I applied these compatability settings and managed to get it to run, couldn't really get it to work before fiddling around with this, incase this could help anyone.

Thanks, man!

It runs in compatibility mode, but it still appears to be missing art assets and it doesn't register to the computer as being full screen so the taskbar displays in front of it and obscures the bottom of the screen

Set your taskbar to "auto hide" on bottom only. it wont obscure your view unless you dip the mouse to the bottom of the screen to activate it again.

I have a zipped folder of chaos overlords. inside that folder is a readme1st file and another zipped folder with all game files. i unzipped the main folder and just started the game from there. I keep it on a flash drive as is. it has worked perfectly on every operating system ive tried so far. it will not save your settings so you will have to set the gameplay as you like it each time. but worth it as it works perfectly without hassle everytime on ANY COMPUTER.

Got it running for me as well, instead of being launched in the background doing nothing... But yeah there are textures missing like the buildings and selected sectors being all white....

the missing "art assets" aka the blank white boxes, is a color issue. I went into the data folder and removed the px16 folder. I kept the folder, just moved it to the root folder. the boxes are no longer blank at that point, but are very low quality. you'll have to fiddle with your own color settings to get them to display properly at this point.

it is a fixable problem, but was quite irritating to find the right color combination settings.