I don’t mean to keep harping on this and I’ll try to make this my last comment on it.
VMPlayer is an excellent way to deal with old apps that simply won’t run under newer versions of Windows or which require painful amounts of tweaking to get them to run.
I have a bunch of old backups that are saved in QIC format. Now, that by itself turns out to be a pretty meaningless statement since QIC means whatever the vendor using that file extension wants it to. My qic files were created with tape backup software under win 95/98/se/Me. Apparently the only software which can still read them is the original version of BackupExec that I used at the time. That meant either setting up an old Pentium 4 rig and finding someway of getting multi-gigabyte files on to the machine for decoding or using a VM.
I tried Virtual PC 2007 under XP and Virtual Box from Sun (now Oracle) and had problems with both. VPC 2007 won’t even run under W7-64. Thankfully I found out about VMPlayer and installed that. I created a VM and installed W98/se and created a virtual disk. With vmplayer you can attach the virtual disk to the host machine as it’s own drive letter and load whatever files you want. Then you detach and reattach to the VM.
It works like a charm. I got the old software installed on the w98 VM along with the old qic backups and have been happily decoding them ever since. Once I’m done it will be a simple matter to get the data back on to the W7 host machine.