Just some throughts...
1. The game doesn't rely on registry entries. When I ripped it and removed its registry entries - while exporting them into a file, of course -, it continued to work happily.
2. I made my usual "savegame dir patch", to have all config files and savegames stored in the "SAVEDATA" subdirectory of the game installation directory. Meanwhile, I also upgraded from 1.05 to 1.06. While testing my patch, savegames wouldn't load anymore, I got "Disconnected from server" all the time. Something in the game went wrong because even removing the patches and moving all files to the proper location, in Windows' all users' documents directory structure, didn't help. So, I re-applied the patches and started playing again. Now it works: version 1.06, cracked (with the 1.04 crack, it does seem to work fine!), "savegame dir patched", games are saved and loaded properly. Weird!
(Damn, finally I had some time to play games this weekend...
)