Hi Anthony, I actually get the same thing over here on Win XP 32-bit.

So it doesn't seem to be a 64-bit specific problem.

I tried running it under a debugger here, and if I ignore the exception that is thrown then I can actually run it.

But it looks like some kind of problem in DLL initialization.

The original blender.exe for 2.49b seems to have a dependency on VCOMP90.DLL (in the blender folder) which does not seem to be listed in your .exe, maybe that is the problem, one missing input in the linker settings?

Also maybe something is sensitive to the order of initialization of the DLLs, the ordering of their loading is different between the original blender.exe and yours - maybe if you use the same order it will avoid some initialization problem.

To see the ordering, use the "Dependency walker" utility (depends.exe), if it is not included with the VC Express edition, you can get it here:
http://www.dependencywalker.com/

- Michael