W00t! Sort of
Grousing about losing my access to the online OED (and a sleepless night due to a head-cold) led me to give another go at installing the CD-ROM version, and this time I discovered some helpful information on the Oxford University Press site, namely that the symptom I was seeing (launching and immediately exiting with no error message) was caused by a Microsoft security patch. Figures. Fortunately, MS had developed a hot-fix for this, and the OUP had a link. I installed it, and wonder of wonders, it actually worked and I had my lovely OED CD-ROM working on my desktop again.
So that’s the w00t.
The sort-of is because in the process I discovered that they’ve released two new point-releases of the CD-ROM since I bought it, which among other things allow it to download updates from their site, fixes the printing problems, and removes the stupid, stupid relicense-every-ninety-days restriction. Which would be great, except there doesn’t seem to be any upgrade path from the v3.0 2004 disks that I have to the the v3.1.1 2005 disks. So it appears that unless I want to buy it again, I’m stuck with the original retarded DRM. I’m going to dig around further, but at least in the meantime I can once again bask in the glory that is the OED.
update: It turns out there is an upgrade from 3.0 to 3.1.1 for $70, so I’ve ordered it. Just never having to re-install the license is worth that to me, plus it appears that the 3.1.1 version is necessary to run reliably on Mac OS X under an emulator, which would be my ideal way to do it. Pretty much the only thing I use my Windows machine for is to play City of Heroes and run a couple of other programs that only like Windows (until MS broke it, the OED CD-ROM was one of those). Being able to carry the OED around on my Mac laptop would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.