Maybe try checking your Windows Defender threat detection history and see if it's preventing or quarantining something the program needs? I'm pretty sure 9.17.1b should be in the clear detection-wise, but sometimes when Defender snipes a program it thinks is bad, it results in weird errors. That's a not-quite-wild guess though.
I'm actually going to release 9.18 tomorrow, which is built with a totally different version of Python, so you could try that:
http://vectorpoem.com/playscii/playscii_win32-9.18.zip
(windows might complain that you're downloading a file from a non-HTTPS site)