Well, I tried all what you advised on and STILL get the DOS box error. Only difference was that in full-screen mode, the DOS box never appeared but the gameplay/screen just froze. So I had to do a ctrl-alt-del to get to Task Manager and exit the game.
One interesting thing I notice however is when I play the very first QB after launching the game, and only one on one, whether I win or lose, whatever ship blows up does NOT stop the game. But, any other QB after that brings up the DOS box very soon after a ship blows. Or, if the very first QB after launching the game is with multiple ships, the first ship to blow will not stop the game, but any successive ship after the first one will bring up the DOS box??!!
Has ANYONE ever found the cause for this and most importantly, is there a fix?
So here's the situation, I experimented with a bunch of different settings and discovered that recently, I got the high-res fix for non-KM installs to up my BC res to 1920x1080 which is not native to the game resolution choices. It works fine but in a nutshell, non-KM BC installs with this fix does NOT like it when it comes to explosions!
As I mentioned before, if playing the very first QB 1 on 1 with another ship, the loser that explodes causes no DOS box/freeze to manifest itself. But any explosion after that first one causes the issues. So, after trying many different scenarios/setting changes and other stuff, I decided to lower my game res to one that's native to BC. The issue never came up again after all successive explosions in QB!
Now here's the thing, I really want to have my game res at 1920x1080 but if I do, the problem persists... and I don't have the Python programing knowledge to rectify the problem.
I know the BC community has some top-notch Python coders out there that can probably deal with this issue so I'm putting out the call to see if someone wants to take this on as it's a serious problem. I did this first hard part in researching and isolating the cause, now it would be great if my fellow "Starfleet software engineers" out there could take the reigns and see if this can be fixed
Thing that I can't understand is whoever created the BC higher res fix in the first place didn't more thoroughly test out all the possible ramifications of that fix?!