Well, if its any consolation, us users of old-school Thrustmaster gear (FLCS user here) have to go through the same nonsense with Windows XP. We can use it in XP, but to program it, we need to either dual-boot to Win98 or DOS, or use a DOS boot disk, OR (and here is the really interesting part) use VMWare to run a DOS VIrtual Machine in XP.
Somehow, this is supposed to work. I haven't tried it yet.
-Llama