I have a media program on five CDs which I find I cannot view.
I'm running Windows XP Professional.
When I run the first CD it installs several files after making changes to config.sys and win.ini files.
When I click 'open' I get the message "Can't run 16 bit Windows program----- an application has attempted to directly access the hard disk, which cannot be supported. This may cause the application to function incorrectly. Choose close to terminate.
I have 256 Mb of memory.
My system directory says I'm running windows 32.
Can anyone help.

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... I get the message "Can't run 16 bit Windows program ... I'm running windows 32...

maybe i'm being a bit simplistic, but it sounds like u answered your own question

You can't run a 16 program in a 32 enviroment. You probably can, but try to google it.

So if I can't run A 16 bit prog in a 32 bit environment is there any way I can change the environment. Sorry if this sounds naive.

You can change the environment ... by changing the operating system. If it's that important to you, dual boot Windows XP with an older version of Windows that has 16-bit support.

I've just found a compatibility wizard in XP but guess what ? It doesn't work.

I have a media program on five CDs which I find I cannot view.
I'm running Windows XP Professional.

From the rest of your post, it looks like this was a program designed for Windows 3.1 -- what program is it? Are you trying to read a particular type of file? Perhaps there's another program that will run under XP that will do the job.

When I run the first CD it installs several files after making changes to config.sys and win.ini files.

Strictly speaking, those files don't exist under XP (except as dummies), which is why things fail.

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