KQ6 in *any* version is far from inferior. 😉 But to each their own.
The weird thing about some of the early Sierra games for windows is that they need to start up within an active DOS-based environment since Windows acted like a frontend for DOS. So while VDMS doesn’t do anything for the game itself, you need it to simulate that environment before the game can start up. Otherwise, if you double click on the shortcut or the EXE itself, it won’t do anything. Space Quest 4 for windows was like this, too.
I wouldn’t say that the steps are nonsense since I’ve spent a few hours getting all my old DOS games to work in windows XP without requiring their CD’s to play. KQ6 just ended up being the biggest problem. Getting KQ6 for DOS to work is easy, but I like to challenge myself. =) It feels good to get things working where the solution isn’t obvious. But since there doesn’t seem to be a quick magical fix to this cursor bug aside from installing VirtualPC or an older version of windows, looks like I’m out of luck. I’m in no mood to design a full-scale 16-bit Windows emulator project. =P