I used to have the same problem dragonsyth, but now I've got a new laptop running Vista that I've never had any trouble using shoddy with. On the xp PC I downloaded shoddy and was using it just fine for a few months. Then I stopped playing, came back a while later, and it wouldn't load, I kept getting application error messages.
So, I attempted to uninstall it, but I got an error message saying "unable to completely uninstall". From then on I just kept getting the same error message. Then I found a way to get around it by launching the application from another user account on xp.
Since that's not working I don't really know what else to tell you to try. You could try a system restore to the point when it was working if that won't cause too many problems for the other people using your computer. Syberia was having a similar problem with shoddy and said the only way he fixed it was a complete reinstall of the os. I would try a system restore first though before taking such drastic measures.