Vista - Old LucasArts Game Errors in Vista

In January I bought my new Gateway DX4200-09, with Vista. Since then, some of my favorite old games do not function. Particularly, one of my very favorite games of all time: Jedi Knight (Dark Forces II), from LucasArts, 1997. When I put the disc in, the install prompt comes up, same as always, but when I try to install it, I get this message (and I quote,)

"The Jedi Knight Setup program was unable to launch. You can install Jedi Knight by running SETUP.EXE directly from the Jedi Knight CD-Rom disk #1."

So, no problem.. I just went into explorer and opened the appropriate file, but THEN I get the real error:

"The Program or feature "\??\D:\install\setup.exe" cannot start or run due to incompatibility with 64-bit versions of Windows. Please contact the software vendor to ask if a 64-bit Windows compatible version is available."

They can land a man on the Moon and split the atom, but they can't make a version of Windows that will run old software?

Any solutions?

Have you tried looking for a patch?
Have you tried downloading dos box to see if that solves the problem?
Have you tried running the program in compatability mode?
If this program is 16bit then you will run into problems because 64bit os is not compatable with 16bit programs.

Have you tried looking for a patch?

What kind of patch would service this? A LucasArts one? A Microsoft one?

Have you tried downloading dos box to see if that solves the problem?

No... but, it's not a DOS program. It came out in 1997.

Have you tried running the program in compatability mode?

To the best of my ability... I selected it to run on Windows ME, but the same error persistently comes up.

If this program is 16bit then you will run into problems because 64bit os is not compatable with 16bit programs.

I don't think its 16 bit.... I'd say it's at least 32.

Look at this thred,
Jedi knight dark forces 2 on vista x64