Windows 7 reached end of life in 2015. That means that Microsoft no longer supports it. It has gotten no updates, security patches, or anything else for 10 years. Godot has officially dropped support for Windows 7 as of Godot 4.5, which is due to be released in the nest few weeks. In that announcement, they mention that exporting to Windows 7 has been broken since the implementation of AccesKit. (That was merged into Godot 4.5 dev2 on April 8th, 2025.)
So the unfortunate answer is they are not going to fix any issues you are encountering. Also, they estimated that users of Win 7 make up 1/10th of one percent of users (0.01%). So you may be most of the people using it for Win 7. Which means you might not find anyone here who has tried it. The people on these forums represent a fraction of the user base.
My recommendation is to try going back to Godot 3.5 and see if that works better. Reason being that is maintained in a separate repository but still gets updates. If you can export a small project with Godot 3.5 and it works on Win 7, the solution to your problem is going to be to back-port your project to Godot 3.5 and make due without any of the newer features of Godot added in the last two years.
An alternate recommendation would be to roll back your version of Godot 4 until you find one that works and stick with it. You’d get more features that way, but you’d be on a dead branch. (Remember 3.5 is still getting updates.)
Yes. I doubt Windows 7 has Vulkan drivers. I don’t think it was around 10 years ago.
Drivers do exist for Vulkan on Windows 7 from both NVIDEA and AMD.
The “gotcha” here is going to be the graphics hardware.
Older systems usually have older hardware which won’t handle Vulkan drivers.
The drivers will be lesser versions and may be troublesome in themselves.
I am running 4.3 Stable on my Windows 7 (non-embedded) system without any problems.
I had constant issues with 4.4x and 4.5x won’t run on Win7.
I would try the 4.3 version.