Thanks for trying and your feedback. I have updated the game file.
The reason seems to be that either your graphic card or your driver (the game runs on DirectX7 - so current graphic card driver might cause incompatibilities) doesn't support 640x480 Full screen Mode that the game runs by default. The 'prefs' file forces the game to launch in windowed mode which might be more compatible from a today's point of view.
That was probably the reason it didn't run on lots of current hardware (it worked perfectly fine on my two machines).
Hope that helps and no other issues occur (I can provide troubleshooting like this, but it's quite difficult for me to fix the real underlaying issues because the source code is so dated and it would require a lot of rework).