I suppose your investigation results are quite valuable to XP SP3 users on old and under-resourced H/W; so, thanks for your time spent ; however, unless one had downloaded to disk v21.01.00 when it was still current, it's now a real task to find working/valid links to actual (off-line) installers to it ; I did a simple G-search for it and ALL results on pages 1-3 point to (mostly) stub or off-line installer-links hosted on the vendor's (PANDA) servers; but these tend to download the latest version of the software, not the older one we're after ; I did succeed in the end in finding links to offline installers for v21.01.00, but these were self-hosted on Iranian and/or Russian sites, so, as you can understand, I won't share them publicly here ; other than that, is there a special setting one should configure in v21.01.00 so that it doesn't auto-update to a more recent version?
FWIW, v23.00.00 has now become the latest (digitally signed 22/12/2025) ...
Kindest greetings.