Thanks for the detailed note and it's awesome to see it running on your C7 :-)
One thing to note is this was written in QuickBasic 4.5 and I was trying to avoid external libraries and extensions.
Let me reply to a few of your call-outs:
Quick Setup and Descriptions: I'll remove Quick Setup in future versions. I only put it in after I removed "error handling" capability to detect display type. I am using a monochrome flip-bit to get the extra modes on CGA and it fails on EGA/VGA. Reflecting back, I think the utility was a bit clunky and probably un-necessary. I'll go back to using error handling and I've still got enough room under the 384KB target.
I will update the in-game settings to put a description as to what each setting does.
For reference; I'm only using PC-Speaker (I was struggling to get any adlib/sb to work on the 8088 in QB4.5)
Text Post-Processing (when enabled) will consume some CPU resources while it applies some operations to the UI text.
If you have an original 8088/4.7mhz the text post-processing might be a little too slow and annoying.
The circle (letter wheel actually sounds better) has the letters you can use, if there's 2 "E" then you can attempt to make a word with 2 "E" letters. If there's only 1 then your attempted word may only use 1 "E".
Screen Mode - under CGA it will flick between 640x200 and 320x200 to reset the monochrome bit (enabling the extra palettes) but you're right, for EGA/VGA this can be omitted. At worse I might need to clear the screen, but maybe not..
Regarding 256-color and Adlib - I was targeting 4-color CGA based 8088 and trying to squeeze every bit of detail I could out of it. I've thought about writing a windows 3x version in VB (or possibly TPW1.5) targeting VGA/Sound Blaster and keep the puzzle file format the same.
In the meantime I am going to see if I can sneak in 1.1 and put some of the abovementioned changes in :-)
Thanks again!