For awhile now, one of my clients has been stuck with Corel Paradox 4.0 (it used to be the biggest database system in the DOS days, until Microsoft released Access in the early 90's) so for awhile I've managed to keep it on life support on Windows XP for a few years, however since switching to Windows 7 x64, I've had to resort to using XP Mode as the sandbox to keep it up and running.

While I am able to run Paradox as usual in XP Mode, I'm having a serious issue where if I try connecting the install to the network share (which is located on the Windows 7 portion of the system), Paradox keeps exiting because it says the serial number is invalid.

Now, I know for a fact that this is an issue with the virtual loopback adapter and also having the VM linked to the physical ethernet adapter -- and while I have solved this issue before, most of my fixes have been bandages since after a few weeks the issue pops up again.

Long story short, I wanted to ask if there is a permanent way to link a DOS program to a network share address. For example, when I try doing \tsclient\paradox (the Windows 7 Address) I keep getting an error saying I need a valid network address.

I've tried mapping that folder to various drive letters such as P:\Paradox -- but for some reason that keeps failing over time.

For what it's worth, Paradox uses a .SOM file to store the network settings, however it isn't editable in Notepad but rather it's controlled by a wizard in Paradox. But if that extension rings any bells, I'd welcome any insights.