Ok, so some messing around points to the Lua DLL as the culprit - it *also* conveniently refused to be injected.
THERE! FINALLY! <Expletive removed.> you, bad Lua DLLs! For future reference: These are good Lua binaries that work on Windows XP. The ones supplied with your NICE installation are likely ones that *don't*. V https://sourceforge.net/projects/luabinaries/files/5.1.4/Windows%20Libraries/lua5_1_4_Win32_dll6_lib.zip/download EDIT: Whoops, wrong link.