decided to load this up again, never had any issues, haven't made any changes to pc, but now when i try to run it says file version isn't compatible with my windows version. wtf?

Windows what? Launcher.exe is apparently 64-bit.

Vista, 32-bit. To reiterate, never any issues before today, unless they changed the launcher somehow.

Believe they stupidly did within the last few updates. New shortcut will be in order.

I've had Banished 1.0.4 since March 2015. The shortcut ran Application.exe and there was a folder called WinData.

This May I downloaded GoG's update to 1.0.6. (From the developer's site I see 1.0.6 had followed hard on the heels of 1.0.5) Now the shortcut runs Launcher.exe and there are two folders, Win32 and Win64, containing Application-x32.exe and Application-x64.exe respectively. Each of those folders contains a WinData subfolder.

So yes, it has changed, but it still works for me. My system is x64 Windows10.

The old version (which I kept by renaming my original banished folder before running the new setup_banished_2.5.0.9) does crash if it finds any games saved by the new version.

Yeah, it would. He has 32-bit Vista.