Papa3 wrote:

high-powered XP laptop I figured I'd be all set. However, it
looks like I'm screwed.
2. Would love to boot DOS from a floppy, except that the floppy drive
is SOOO 1990's; ie. there isn't one on this machine.

3. Not sure that I have the energy to create a DOS partition on my
hard-drive

How about a bootable CD with DOS creating a ram drive? Nero will write
a bootable CD. Then you just need to get the file off the ram drive.
There are some DOS to USB methods and drivers out there (try
bootdisk.com) that might talk to a USB pen drive or you could run DOS
network drivers and send it to another machine.

(I hope this post gets out, it's my first in a new Mozilla Thunderbird
installation)
Todd