Captain Ned wrote:It's not Win7-32, as I've got some old 16-bit timewasters (the original MS Tetris for one, from '92) on a laptop running Win7-32 and they run fine natively. Try them on a 64-bit box and of course they go nowhere.
A little googling on the error message suggests problems with the environment variables (path not pointing to the right directory for the Windows On Windows files) but that's all for XP or older, so I'm not sure if Windows 7 changes anything. It would make sense, though, because Win 7 doesn't care about environment variables but old apps will, so it's possible for them to be messed up with no symptoms other than ancient software not running correctly. Win7 still keeps Win.ini and System.ini around, and there's no reason for that except supporting very old apps, so I wouldn't entirely give up. But if it's a problem like bad environment variables, getting it straightened out could be a tricky unless you find a step-by-step guide or somebody who still remembers the details of that crap.