Long story: Your suggestion didn't work, though it was a very good idea, then, I got suspicious. I tried the game with all of the components present, It did not work. Remembering Windows XP's (in)famous performance at running old games I tried the game on my 8 year old Win 95 PC. Surprise, surprise
it worked, even with all of the animations removed. So it seems this game is not compatible with XP. I'll try it on XP with DOSBOX and get back to you.