After installing the font from the cd, I could run the nwc.exe directly from the cd, so I think it's something with the setup.exe. So, I imagine I can get it going.
I went ahead and upgraded to 2.1, anyway. Good use of $15, imo.
I've been playing with all the windows 7 compatibility settings (going back to Windows 98 setting) to try to get the 1.7 installer to run, with no luck. Has anyone successfully done this? It ran fine on a windows 2000 machine.