Not to sure of your problem. I just copied Freecell.exe, Sol.exe, Spider.exe, mshearts.exe, winmine.exe and cards.dll from my VirtualBox XP install from its system32 directory to a folder on my Windows 8.1 64bit installation. I just double clicked the freecell.exe and it ran fine.
You could right click the exe and try compatability mode see if that helps.