Purely by chance, sad as it is
, I was trying to run an old Qbasic prog on my new shiny HP laptop, to find the above warning.
I have discovered the 'fix' SP from HP. If there are any other 'luddite saddos' out there, it is at
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp02501-03000/sp2517.exe