C Program Written in VS2012 Works w/ Win7/8/2008R2/2012, but not 2003/XP/32bit?

Question

I have to start by saying that I am very much a programming noob. I do not understand all the compiler options or nuances of the IDE, not by a longshot. But I am trying to teach

Answer 1

I figured it out myself. (But thank you Hans for steering me in the right direction.) For some reason, even with Update 1 and even after setting my toolset to v110_xp, and setting the minimum required version to 5.01 in the Linker options, the resulting dumpbin app.exe /headers still reports a minimum operating system version of 6.0.

So I simply ran

editbin.exe app.exe /SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE,5.01 /OSVERSION:5.1

And the executable now runs just fine on older operating systems. I'm thinking there still might be a little bit of a bug somewhere in Visual Studio.