Today I tested the new version of the wrapper on my (mostly old) games and on one game (it doesn't matter but it was Hard Track 2) the game refused to start. I immediately thought that there was a problem in the new version and that now I would have to write about it in the regression bugs. But when I returned the old version I got the same thing. I started to understand the problem and first of all unpacked the original game on the RAM disk. It started successfully. There were no differences in the game directories. And I immediately thought about some compatibility settings, which could have been set somehow (although it is impossible). I reset all compatibility settings in the system (I have my own multifunctional tool for this). It didn't help. Then I reset everything related to the explorer, sound mixer, etc. It didn't help too. After that, I went into the registry and started searching for registry keys by game folder name.
I found almost nothing, but there was still something. These were the entries in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\bam\State\UserSettings\<SID>. It stores records of applications that have ever been launched (in the last week). I always considered this section to be technical and not affecting the behavior of applications. I decided to delete the found records (I used the utility superUser64+Registry Workshop). And it helped!
Now the question: I looked for all the available information about this hidden windows service but I still couldn't find an exact description of how it can affect the behavior of applications and prevent them from starting (causing crashes). I propose to discuss this. Perhaps it will be interesting to all the others who may have had problems with launching old games but could not understand what the matter was.
At the moment I am considering several options: to set a permission lock on this section so that the system does not add records there at all, or add a function to clean this section to my windows tool.
I could not find information on how to force the system to clean this section (and it doesn't matter because it won't delete records of existing files).