AFAIK, all or most previous cheat-codes do work in TA (maybe, there's a few more which have yet to be revealed, though).
As for the challenge, i feel your pain - it IS soooo hard to loose when luck could do worst.
Vista? I'm on XP-SP2 Pro, sorry. I doubt there isn't a way to slap the usual tags to a runtime call through an exe though. If not - sue M$.