The game used to work for me on Windows 10, but no longer does. I've tried reinstalling, compatibility modes, with and without wrappers, original build, MMX 2.1 build, unofficial D3D build, they all do it. Including NoCD variants of the mentioned patches. I've tried moving it to different drives, running it from a path with a shorter length, no dice. This is so oddly peculiar. No, I'm not interested in the Alcino Major sandboxed version. He did a good job, but I prefer to do things myself.
I've only seen this issue on the internet once, on a VOGONS thread, in relation to someone trying the D3D version. I was hoping I could just go to 2.1+NoCD like I was successfully running before, but no. Thanks for any knowledge and of course if it's a problem that's known to exist/has known causes it might be good to put a note in the article itself. (It does sound like some sort of file or registry reading issue, but the error dialog is not verbose enough.)