Ha! That's not off topic at all. I've had the dongle problem since DOS6.22 was replaced by NT, then Win2000, then XP, and then Win7 on various computers. Even though I was always careful to get motherboard parallel ports, the dongle doesn't work with anything past DOS6.22 (hence my DOS boot effort on this machine). I don't know if modern operating systems handle the parallel port differently or if it's just a processor speed thing -- but something confuses the dongle until I boot into DOS.
Anyway, I hope to get rid of the dongle completely now that the program is released to public domain. I've already got it working on a couple of Win7 and one XP machine (this one). For some reason, the progran won't run on one other XP machine; complaining that MSVCR71.DLL is missing. I think I'll let the XP install disk setup do a system repair on that one.
I'm still planning to look at your method #4 so I can enter DOS (and hopefully load my CD/DVD drivers) from the boot window though.
-Lee