F*ck!!! Dunno then, have you managed to get other SF games running on the same system using mini images and SF 0.82? Does the retail only install of the game work, i.e. no patches applied?
Have you checked in your 'My Computer' that your CD/DVD drives are actually disabled and therefore not being shown when running SF 0.82?
You don't have an AMD64 or NForce chipset, or optical drives on both Primary and Secondaty IDE, because I can't think of any other reason for it not working?
This is being a bit of a twat isn't it