Windows 7+ and ABBYY Sprint

[grumbles]

For several years I have been using ABBYY Sprint (FineReader 6.0 Sprint Plus), it came with my scanner, to do OCR from scans and photos of books or images from PDFs from the internet archive. It works well enough, I run the images through Scan Tailor to clean them up and then select all the pages (images) in Sprint and convert to text (rtf actually) to cleaned up at leisure. Works well with Windows XP.

I have a brand new 4GHz i7 with Win7 HP. I installed Sprint, grabbed a PDF, converted it to images and tried to run the program. Windows 7 will only let me select up to about 14 files at a time in the selection dialog. The book is 260 images. Useless! Completely bloody useless!

My question is: does Windows 8 have the same bug?

Note that this is not a bug in Sprint, others have noted this problem with other software and Windows 7.

Now I do have an old version FineReader. Version 4 which was the cover software with PCPlus some time around 2003 or 2004, the exe from the cd has a date of 2001. It installs and runs with 7 but the user interface is rough and the recognition is nowhere near as good as FineReader. But it does work with 7.

And before anyone suggests that I buy a recent version FineReader: I was happy enough with Sprint that I decided to do just that except that ABBYY changed their software so that it required activation. I DO NOT PURCHASE ANY SOFTWARE THAT REQUIRES ACTIVATION!!! NOT EVER!!! (Windows excluded by necessity)

If Windows 8 or higher has the bug fixed then I might wait for Windows 10. Otherwise I can either look into running XP in a virtual machine with Linux ( 3.5Ghz i7) but quite honestly I'm tired of playing with software and operating system, I want to get something done or I can put together a small fast system just running XP.

So, does anyone know if versions of Windows 8 or higher has the file select bug fixed?