Showstopper glitch in battle during flashback in Kalm. [SOLVED]

[Silent Warrior]

So, now I run into my first serious FF7-problem past getting it to run at all in XP. Howzat? Right, the problem.
During said flashback, there's the scene where Cloud paces round and round the Shinra-truck, asking the fellow soldier about his motion-sickness and getting excited about his new Pre-Emptive materia. (You know the one?) Right after that, there is a battle with a big green dragon. And the catch is that the dragon absolutely cannot be targeted. It can use Flamethrower all it wants, but Young Cloud and Sephiroth can only attack themselves - as if the dragon just isn't there. In other words, I can watch until hell freezes over as Sephiroth tries to kill himself and the dragon torches Cloud again and again. No crash as such.
This seems to be patch/mod-independent - it happens with official 1.02, PRP, tweaked flevel.lgp as well as unmodified, irrespective of kernel2.bin-tweaks...
System is a laptop: HP Pavilion dv1000. I'm unsure about the exact specs (it's not my own), but it's running XP SP3. Compatibility-mode is set to... either Win95 or 98. Won't run otherwise. For reasons we can discuss later, I'm running the game through a disc-emulator - images are prepared from my own LEGIT discs, I'll have you know.

Does anyone know of a fix, or is this a case for the Playthrough-request topic?

[Terid__K]

Try playing through it in an unmodded game, just to be sure. The normal behavior would be either Sephiroth killing the dragon right away or after several turns if the dragon keeps targeting Cloud.

[Silent Warrior]

I tried it with the official 1.02-exe - same result. Or do you mean playing through the game up to that point with no edit of any sort, from the very top, so to speak?

[Edit] Haha! I managed to get through on my own! I used Jenova to give myself some 8-inch cannons and other attack-items, and they worked as advertised! Strange, though, that regular attacks wouldn't target the dragon while items did... Anyway, this is SOLVED. And I LIKE 8-inch cannons.