🚀 go-pugleaf

Hope somebody out there can shed some light on the following; I'm stumped.
I had a 286-12MHz, 1Mb-RAM, 40Mb-HDD clone for 3 years.  It ran every 
IBM-compatible program I ever tried on it without a problem.  This 
includes WordPerfect 4.2 through 5.1, Windows, Norton 6, PC-Tools 6, 
etc.  I have a color SVGA card in it with 256K of memory.  I believe 
the card is a Prism.

Now I sold the computer to my boss, except that I kept my multisynch
color-monitor and bought a new monochrome VGA-monitor to go with the
286 computer.  Everything else is the same, and the programs I had loaded
still run fine.  Two games, Flight and EGA Trek (shareware), also seem to 
work fine on it.  So my boss buys Reader Rabbit and Math Blaster for
his kid, and installs them, and neither one will run.  They both just
lock up the computer.

My boss, believing me to be a computer wizz, has me over for dinner
and expects me to get the two programs to run and tell him what's
wrong.  I can't for the life of me figure out why they won't run.
At first I thought it was the mono monitor with color card that
was fooling the programs.  I suppose that is indeed possible.  But
why those particular programs, yet none that I had tried from among
a dozen programs?  Both Reader Rabbit and Math Blaster seem to have
utility programs to manually set the monitor types, and I ran both,
but still get only a lockup requiring a reboot when I run the programs.
Yes, I did re-install each from scratch.

I brought the software home and installed both programs successfully on
my 386SX mono-VGA laptop, which blew at least part of my theory that
it was the mono monitor causing a problem.  But since the card and
monitor in his machine may still not be thoroughly compatible, I
suppose that could still be the problem.  HOWEVER: why would this
lock up the machine requiring a reboot, rather than just run with
not all the graphics displaying right, as I would have predicted if
there were a monitor/card problem?

Oh, if it sheds any light, the Reader Rabbit is version 4.0, and Math
Blaster has no version number but has a release date of 1990.

Please, please send me some suggestions, if you have any, before I
have to buy the damn system back from my boss and eat crow.

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