I should have thought of Alt+Enter, really. I just don't think it'll solve my problem (part of it is that my active screen area ends up being much smaller than the whole monitor once the screen goes black), but I'll try it anyway. Thank you.

Alt-Enter is the usual key combination that toggles between full screen and windowed mode.

It works with the command shell, and many games of the games that have been offered on GGOTD.

No guarantees for all programs though, some programs might deliberately not support windowed mode.

My monitor is big - the correct resolution for it is 1680x1050. I recognize this as a "non-standard" resolution and as such don't really expect everything to look or run perfectly on it.

Unfortunately, most of the time when I run a game I download from this site, it defaults to fullscreen mode and my whole machine starts acting up, usually resulting in the screen going black. Everything's still responsive - I can hit Windows+U+R to restart it, I can alt+tab out of the offending program (while retaining the black screen), etc. I have the latest drivers for my monitor and I doubt that the video card needs to be replaced, so what I'm wondering is if there's some kind of universal way of forcing a program to run in windowed mode at startup* or if I'm just screwed.

* - in this case I'm meaning something similar to how one can append "-safemode" when running firefox, and things like that, though I'm open to other suggestions. I'm running Windows XP.

Thanks in advance.