reminded me of a game I used to play called Sopwith
Looked for screenshots of this game. From the screenshots I see there are some similarities in the sprite work indeed .

Anyway, I tried to play your game (both exe's) but it returned an access violation right on startup. (using Windows 7)
Strange. I tried the game on a Windows 7 Home Edition Notebook and on a Win7 PC. Both worked fine. I assume it is not related to Win7 then. When starting the windowed version, do you get a window popping up (maybe for a very short time) or just nothing except for the error?