"This program has encountered a problem and needs to close"

I'm really sad because whenever I try to open dosbox or American McGee's Alice it crashes on startup, giving the above error message. Virus and spyware scans are clean, and reinstalling is unsuccessful. I used to be able to use these programs just fine.
See screenshot and error message attached.

I am using
WinXP with 2.00 gigahertz Intel Pentium Dual,
ASUSTeK Computer INC. P5K SE Rev 1.xx mobo,
2048 Megabytes Installed Memory
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT [Display adapter]
Realtek High Definition Audio

Please help.

 

Not familiar with those apps but have you updated to SP3 recently which could be causing the prob?

Other than that maybe try the portable version of dosbox.
Portable DOSbox

 

Hello,
You're running DOSBox 0.65. The current version is 0.7x something.
So you should first try to uninstall the existing version, then install the latest and try that one.
Mrk