I've looked at the EXE file, and it's supposed to print "This program cannot be run in DOS mode." when run under (real or emulated) DOS.

The reason why it fails to do that is that the compiler did not set the memory allocation fields in the header correctly, so the stack is either overwriting random memory or may be somewhere that isn't writable at all!

Apparently nobody tests this stub code anymore, might as well leave it out completely...

(maybe Windows even accepts files that start with the PE header instead of MZ?)