To try and answer the latest round of questions in order:
1. Yes, I'm interested in rediscovering the program mainly for my own entertainment. It would certainly have useful purposes.
2. The original floppy diskette went bad (unrecoverable read error/bad sectors). Same as this one. I'm guessing they used "grade B"/duplicator grade media. I'm 100% sure it got tossed a LONG time ago.
3. Without wanting to sound grumpy or anything: anything the online world has to offer by way of a web search is something I've seen. The fake torrent link, WorldCat, etc...if Google or another reputable search engine comes up with it, I've seen it. :-) I'm here because I've exhausted pretty much every other option.
4. You can be sure I've scoured eBay and other places for this software. This is not a new search. I've been constantly looking for basically all of the last 20 years. I've seen the program come up for sale once on a rather suspicious looking web site. They couldn't deliver the goods.
5. The disk doesn't use copy protection or special formatting. It's a bog standard FAT12 formatted high density 3.5" diskette. I read it on an actual floppy drive attached to an actual floppy drive controller...none of this USB drive nonsense. (If you really care, the drive is whatever Dell installed from the factory in a Dimension 8300 I bought new. The computer runs Windows XP. I took an image of the disk before I did anything else using WinImage. The drive works perfectly.)
As to the whole matter of such diskettes failing...if you've truly never lost one due to media failures, you are a far luckier person than I, or anyone I know. :-)
I'm not new to the game of trying to bring stubborn diskettes back to life, and I've tried every trick that I know (of course, taking an image of the disk as it existed, with the write protect switch set, before ever doing anything). I believe it's beyond saving, don't really wish to send it out, and really am hoping that someone, somewhere, either still has this program installed on their computer's hard drive or the complete software package hiding away somewhere. (All of that said, I don't have any special disk controller boards or other specialized hardware to try. Not that it would matter now, because something rather unfortunate has happened to the diskette since.) Nor do I have any shortage of good working older computer equipment (PC/XT, 286, 386, 486, only early Pentiums aren't well represented in my collection).
I don't particularly enjoy computer programming, but maybe it's time I just buckled down and wrote a program that does the same thing this one used to do. It can't have been all that difficult -- I believe the original to have been written in Visual Basic 3.0.
The question I'm ultimately really asking is "Who has a copy of this program?" Or thinks they do. Or remembers someone who did. Or has it still moldering away on their hard drive. Not "how can I revive a long ago defective diskette".