I give up, I opened a ticket with Ubisoft. I have the game itself in:
C:\games\Ubisoft\SilentHunterIII\sh3.exe
The game itself was purchased years ago and installed on an ancient desktop in the garage that i decided to toy around with. In the properties tab, it doesn't show me the version of the game (patch wise) but since i installed them all the way up to 1.4 I'm confident it should be up to date. I didn't have any issues with patching. It just doesn't want to recognize the windows version on my laptop to open
