dvd shrink

[bdub]

hey guys, been a long time since i looked at this forum, and am happy to see it still around. i come to ask if anybody else has had issues with dvdshrink not working anymore.
i have happily used it since the early days, installing it on whichever OS i was using at the time (now on win10 and have been for a few years) with little to no issues until two days ago i went to fire it up, and NOTHING! no error messages popup, nothing, cursor circles for an instant then stops, and you could wait a year and nothing comes on the screen. there is a message in the applications events in event viewer about it, an application error that i didn't save a screenshot of, so i can't relay that message (i stupidly cleared my logs while i was there)... but it just pointed to the program wasn't starting, blah, blah, blah.
anyhow, i dirty install dvdshrink again, same result. then clean install it, same result, although this time it does error in a manner that you see something on the screen when it installs that says "the program did not install correctly... but there's the icon on the desktop, and same result when you hit that icon.
this happened out of the blue the other day. i had used it maybe a month an a half ago with no issues. nothing has changed much about my system lately, save for windows updates.
so then i load up an older win7 OS that i had on another hdd laying around, SAME THING... you hit the icon and nothing.
i tell my sister about it, she uses it from time to time too. she also is on win10 and doesn't keep up with windows updates as much as i do... she reports back that hers stopped working too in much the same manner.
was there some kind of timebomb written into the software to EOL this program? what's up? it did the same thing on 2 different systems, and 3 different OS's (one being a legacy OS that hasn't been updated in any way in YEARS!).
next i'm going to break out my old XP install from a different hdd to see if i can get it working again in this machine to see if shrink produces the same result there.
TIA. i hope to read any results others are having.
also, is there an alternative? i used handbrake to turn my dvd into a .mkv file (that was 20 gigs big, so great quality), then i took the result and put it thru bdtoavchd to shrink it down to fit on a dvd5, and i thought i had the alternative i was searching for, but the final stage of the process errored out... so no joy there.