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by JonathonW 3637 days ago
That's because it's treating it as a 16-bit DOS executable (since it has the 'MZ' magic number but not the rest of the PE header that tells Windows that it's 32 or 64-bit). 64-bit Windows can't run 16-bit executables at all.

32-bit Windows should fail a little later in the execution process; it can run 16-bit software, but your text file is missing the rest of the MZ-format header.