Sorry about that I didn't see your reply! Because I have to use phone it's challenging to type out all I did. While I achieved it, I wouldn't say it's sensible or easy!

Anyway, you have to turn off c++, c++ exceptions, security checks in compiler options. In linker set the entry point to main and turn off error reporting. From there it's finding the right lib which is dependent on arch, etc.

To be honest it's not worth doing. I only knew of it because I had to patch a vs2010 exe to run on windows 2000.