Use Etcher.
OK I know W7 is out of date but is there a reason why SD creator will no longer even open, no error message or anything in W7?
Win7 is no longer supported. Given the quantity of security issues in it now we'd strongly advise you update it to Win10 (which is free IIRC).
No idea, we will be using somewhat default Qt options and if there's a change it will be something Qt releated. Nobody on the project staff has much of a clue about Qt - which is why it's taken 2.5 years to respin an updated version of the app. If you can find someone with Qt skills who can take our sources and tell us explicitly what's wrong and needed to support Win7 (without breaking everything else) we'll re-add support. Anything that involves project staff needing to skill up on Qt to fix it won't happen (see prevous 2.5 years comment) and there's a lot more fun, interesting and needed things to do around the project.
