It isn't obvious from these screenshots, but NT 3.1 is a lot more memory intensive than DOS and 3.1 are.
Where Windows 3.1 will happily (more or less anyway) run in 4 MB of RAM (or less), the minimum requirement for NT 3.1 is 8 MB, and as you can see, you do not want to run it on that!

After giving the system 16 MB of RAM it was a lot happier.

If a service or device driver fails to load on startup, this message will appear. A common sight...

Here is a look at the default Windows NT 3.1 desktop, with the Program Manager. Apart from being user-aware (and 32-bit), it looks and acts like the 3.1 Program Manager.

Here is a close-up look at the icons under the program groups.
It is possible to have "common" program groups that are the same for all users, and "personal" ones that differ from user to user. All the default program groups are considered "personal".