Funny thing about that ..
the vendor, in order to keep a sale, after finding nothing I have worked with Vista removed Vista, and installed Xp proffesional on all 30 units.
Vendor and Hp have been working ever since, none of the thirty units work .. they claim that in the swap Xp was corrupted as well. None of the new machines that were swapped to Xp will run any of my Data Acquistion or controll systmes. My older units with Xp run them just fine.
Microsoft has walked away. I will run, not walk as well.
This is interesting. Are the DOS apps? Do they require some piece of hardware to run such as a dongle?