I installed 1946 for first time yesterday.
It ran great every time I booted up WinXP, but only would run once and then a system reboot was necessary for exactly one more play.
If and only if after playing 1946, exiting XP caused the dreaded 'this program is not responding' screen announcing DIEmWin as the culprit.
Googling revealed D* is not malware, but is something which is supposed to run whenever a DX or OGL game exits and tries to resize the display resolution back to desktop value. And some reports of trouble stopping it, once started.
The cure was simply a system restore to two days ago, now the DIEmWin problem is dead!
So if you ever see the D* error box, then hopefully you have some recent system restore points!
P.S. back when the problem was still present, BoB II, CFS3\OFF, SilentHunter 4, .etc were all running fine , only IL2 was giving trouble. I think because it was the only one not playing at my native desktop resolution (widescreen 16:10).