Yeah, the newest old version rebuilds and New Quest 2003's original file work fine in 2.50.2. Resaving the code in the original format helped out a lot.
That might be the case, with dual items causing an issue. Still, it's been in many other quests and 1.90+ didn't have that problem, so I'm kinda befuddled.
BTW. big big thanks to the DOSBox team (@Rambly and @Tim ) for the extensive help on some of these issues too and helping getting pre-1.92 versions working functional again. Give them a shout-out for everything they did to help this (and validating 1.02 as playable again too!)
-James