I admit I am not very technical with computers. I can install, click exe's, hit properties and change permissions on some things, etc. I am just a "user" of my computer. I don't program, but I used to, like FORTRAN in the 1970s in a high school class and PASCAL and Visual Basic in the early 80s in college and a little assembler-like programming on some gig-jobs once or twice in the 30 years hence, but that's it. I don't know how to "mod" or where to even begin to learn. I used Linux for a while in the 90s, but again, pretty much as a "user." I've used various types of CAD, solid modeling, and FEA (finite element analysis) and a little CFM (computational fluid dynamics) but again as a "user" of these tools to design things. I know I'm not stupid, I'm just unfamiliar with computers beyond/below using window interfaces.
About a year ago a Win 11 update went through that killed my AA2. Now when I run it, it stops at "The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b). Click OK to close the application.)" and I absolutely cannot find any clear, step-by-step instructions about HOW to diagnose what is stopping the program and how to get execution past this halt point. This prevents the program from getting to the window where you even get to select windxd or geass etc. I've seen some threads that say it's a missing .dll but many of them say the answer is to download a pack of hundreds of .dlls from (what? safe? not safe?) Site X and drop the whole dumpster into /System32 and I decline to do that.
I would meekly ask for help here if anyone knows how to diagnose and fix the halt.