I did look over at Jowoods forum GLH and didn't see anything of relevance.
The game actually runs fine, it's just the AI that is wickedly accurate. I think it may be old game + newer hardware/software.
If someone else with the game can just install it and test with patch v1.50 to see if it's the same it would help. I guess I could uninstall and reinstall then try the game from retail through all the patches using the same savegame as a benchmark and see if the game varies in difficulty between retail and patches and also with cracked/uncracked EXE's.
That should be fun, installing all those patches then cracks and playing the same level over and over
