Dongles are evil. E.V.I.L.
The device you see on the right is actually the devil. Or, at least, it's close enough if you are a system administrator.
It is a single piece of hardware that controls your access to business-critical programs. Lost the dongle? Whoops, no classified ads in the newspaper this week. Dongle broke? Ditto. Dongle fried by a computer malfunction or power fault? Ditto. Computer stolen? Ditto.
What's even more fun is that as computers move on and older interfaces become obsolete, it becomes hard to even find a computer you can plug the dongle in to. Most machines don't have parallel ports anymore, so parallel dongles like this one are a big problem. At least that can be worked around using USB adapters.
Of course, then you run into exciting issues like XP being unable to allow 16-bit code access to the parallel port. The program would work fine on XP, but for the stupid bloody dongle. So you're forced to maintain legacy hardware or waste time on complex emulation/virtualisation options just to get the program working, when it'd be just fine but for this dongle.
So, if you are ever offered software for any reason that requires a dongle, just say no.
Getting it working on XP
Ooooh, made you hopeful?!
32 bit apps should just work, so you should be.
16 bit apps won't and can't be made to. NTVDM won't grant access to the parallel port I/O ports and IRQs to the app. What you CAN do is run a Win9x VM under Virtual PC, grant it access to the parallel port, and run your app in the 98 VM.
I hate dongles.