Gonzo,
I've run DOSbox on XP just to see how it runs. Runs??? Walks would be a better description. I would imagine that the combination of Vista and DOSbox could work as a last resort, but it would be slow on "lesser" hardware.
DOSbox is slow since it does a full emulation of the X86 instruction set as well as DOS. I gather that there is somewhere something to allow running DOS applications on X86 hardware that just intercepts the DOS calls and uses the underlying X86 hardware instead of emulating it.
seacue