I can only offer that I picked up the Steam version dirt cheap on sale and it runs fine on my old Win 7 64-bit Dell XPS laptop. I was playing it last week without problems, without needing to tweak any compatibility settings in Windows.

Quite some time ago I tried my original CD-based version with all the patches and fixes listed here, and still had problems with it, similar to what you describe. I never did resolve them (until I picked up the version on Steam).