The American Girls Dress Designer was originally intended to be run on Windows 95, 98 and ME. At the time, NT was a business-grade operating system, and supporting an OS few families would even bother owning would add up to development costs. If your copy of Dress Designer is malfunctioning on a new system, follow the appropriate link below to download and open the Dress Desginer Crash Fix. Then follow the simple installation instructions.

Click here to download the EXE patcher
Click here to download the .ASI fix (work in progress; coming soon)

The patch fixes an issue with Dress Desginer that prevented popup windows from being displayed ingame. Please note that this is an unofficial, work-in-progress fix; additional functionality may be added over time.

If you have any other questions, concerns or suggestions regarding this compatibility fix, feel free to email the author at blakegriplingph@gmail.com.

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Assuming you have already installed Dress Designer, download and double-click AGDD_hMenuFix_upd.exe to start the patch installer.

2. You'll be prompted to locate the folder where Dress Designer is installed. If that looks correct to you, click Next to continue, and then click Next again to start the patching process.

3. Once that's done, you'll now have a fixed version of Dress Designer, ready to play. Previously saved outfits and other save data will remain untouched.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

What does the patch do?
To be more technical, it fixes an oversight on part of the developers when they implemented windowing functionality ingame. You see, in Windows, there's a function called CreateWindow and CreateWindowEx that is responsible for drawing almost all of the windows and other such stuff. For reasons unknown, one of the parameters called hMenu, to which you can bind menu resources to a window, was left at 1, though an unused menu resource can be found in the EXE, which may mean that at one point a menu bar was to be added, only to be made redundant by the red band below the scenery. The oversight didn't seem to matter to them as the game worked happily on Windows releases of the day. Unfortunately, their shortsightedness reared its ugly head, and when XP came, many a parent and child complained about how horridly broken the game turned out to be.

More technical notes can be found on this page at The Cutting Room Floor and on this GTAForums thread.

Is the patch safe? Will we be getting viruses from this?
Yes the patch is completely safe to use, and we have tested this thoroughly to make sure it doesn't glitch up or worse. I understand your concern about computer safety, but rest be assured nothing bad will happen with this fix. A number of antivirus vendors however may flag this as malicious, but why would I even release this for any nefarious intent anyway? Here's a VirusTotal scan on the patched EXE.