All right......You didn't specifically say RA1.
Well... he did say "ORIGINAL"
Same here- Red Alert 1 works fine on my XP, and also my Vista. I believe it required special launch options that "The First Decade" Launcher uses to get it working- I'll take a look.
OK... took a look-see before I posted this. It does indeed use a command-line option- "-cd." but I believe that is simply to prevent the need for the CD.
it was "RA95.EXE" size was 2,705,599 bytes. It was also set for "compatibility" with windows 95.
Try both of those options, and make sure the RA95 you have is the same size, could be a patch they made later on.