Turns out that PuTTY hasn't run successfully on legacy Windows since
0.66, in spite of an ongoing intention to keep it working. Among the
reasons for this is that CreateWindowExW simply fails with
ERROR_CALL_NOT_IMPLEMENTED: apparently Win95 and its ilk just didn't
have fully-Unicode windows as an option.
Fixed by resurrecting the previous code from the git history (in
particular, code removed by commit 67e5ceb9a8e6bc2 was useful), and
including it as a runtime alternative.
One subtlety was that I found I had to name the A and W window classes
differently (by appending ".ansi" to the A one): apparently they
occupy the same namespace even though the names are in different
character sets, so if you somehow manage to register both classes,
they'll collide with each other without that tweak.
f500d24a95