This was unintended. Fixed in 2.4.1!
I re-purchased just because of this change and indeed 2.4.1 works on XP again, but Vista still for some reason crashes the game from the beginning and I'm not sure why tho... At least now I can run in the old XP again, thanks for fixing the issue...
It works fine on Vista 32-bit for me, so it doesn't sound like a Windows version problem...
It just stop working and gives the Microsoft Windows error on launch. On version 2.4 also was happening the same thing.