Hey, j0t, I'm glad you like it. Do remember that this would not be possible without your loader, as I was looking at that situation all wrong. I was trying to figure out what to change in KiCAD itself, not adding an external function it was missing. I found the error message when launching _eeschema.exe very confusing, as one of the things it referenced was file loaded successfully. If it loaded successfully, why is it not working? Remember, I am not a programmer, nor do I pretend to be one. But I do know enough to beat my way through some situations…
As for patching out the nag messages, you would not believe how easy that is. I just open up each file in x64dbg and search for a string reference to "unsupported operating system", then start scrolling up from that location. Around 10 items up, there is a jne instruction, just change it to a jmp and then choose to apply patches. Oh, yes, save an unpatched version of each file first. I can patch that out for all seven files in under 15 minutes, and then I got a little batch script which compares the patched to unpatched files and creates the .bspatch files for each of them. The registry entries are also fairly easy, although they do take some time. I simply do a clean install on a Windows 10 or 11 VM, export the relative registry entries, and combine them all into a single file. This only needs to be done once per major version. The start menu shortcuts I do very crudely, I simply generate the links and put them any folder, and my script moves them to the start folder.
I like your suggestion about listing the source of the two binaries, I will do that in my next release. Although, I am not sure that the binary I got for api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll comes from the source you listed. I got it several years ago when trying to set up a chia form on a Windows 7 machine. The chia would not run on Windows 7, somebody else posted a fix to make it work using that DLL. A few years later I had a problem with sabnzb not wanting to run on Windows 7, that DLL fix the problem there as well. Then it popped into my mind that perhaps this was KiCAD's problem as well. In version 7 it was indeed the only problem, and I thought others might like to know as well :-)
At my end, KiCAD is no longer being run on Windows 7. My old Q9450 based system is still running quite well (I built it back in '08) but being stuck with 8 GB of memory and only a SATA1 interface for the hard drive was getting to be a drag. Especially as I usually have a few dozen tabs open in Chrome, a ton of background programs running, bunch of PDFs open in Acrobat, etc. So I finally decided to upgrade and him currently running a Core Ultra 7 265K system with 192 GB of memory and an nvme drive. Unfortunately, running Windows 7 on that hardware is not a viable option. I'm sure I could get it to boot and run, just don't think it would have to many functional devices attached. So I'm dealing with Windows 11. Speed and stability are excellent, some parts of the UI are a big step backwards.
For doing things like coming up with this install package though, it's really nice. I've created VMware machines for everything from Windows XP up to 11, configured him as I like, and then compress them into an archive on the nvme drive. When I want to use one, I extract the archive to a RAM drive and run the VM from there. It's lightning fast, and if I make a mistake I need to try again, I just delete from the RAM drive and extract the archive again. Back up and running and maybe 2 to 3 minutes :-)
In case you are wondering, the old Windows 7 machine did not get retired to the attic. I recently bought a CO2 laser and a fiber laser with the Galvo head, the old computer will be in charge of running those as soon as I get some space cleared.