Good news!
Originally I was playing Aurora on a 12" xp laptop (not a netbook) and everything worked fine esp Aurora. Eventually after many years of faithful service, it became bypassed by newer technology for frontline on the road use. So a month ago I got a newer laptop with windows 7 and the nice screen tricks with XP no longer work and I had a screen resolution of 1366x768. And that is good for what I need except Aurora. In the interim I had acquired a so-so laptop with Vista that I had little use for as it had a small hard drive and was consigned to e-mail and mp3 editing. With the Aurora screen size problems and the other 2 problems mentioned above, I installed it on the Vista machine. Low and behold, the Vista machine has a resolution of 1280x800! For the same size 14" screen.
Long story short and a new larger hard drive and a new windows 7 install later. Aurora works. There was a problem with F9 and a missing dll file, but thanks to other posts by other knowledgable players in the windows 7 installation thread, I was able to take care of it. So the ex vista unit is now my road laptop.
The other 2 problems mentioned previously are still there, but don't seem to interfere with game playing.
Thanks all for the help.