Off the top of my head, rightclick on the executable, and run it in compatibility troubleshooter. That might help diagnose it if it hangs, and you kill it.
Alternately run it on a VM. Its going to be an annoyance finding a legitimate copy of windows 95/98SE (and I doubt it would do seamless mode/unity or other useful things), but you might be able to get away with running the program in a VM with an newer older version of windows.
Unfortunately windows 8.1 dosen't have XP mode, so its up to you to get a licence for some older copy of windows, and maybe run it in a VM host that has some flavour of seamless mode.
So for testing purposes, grab a copy of vmware player (its free), grab a copy of the VM for the windows version you want to test off modern.ie, install corel printhouse on it and try it. The VM should work for ~3 months and/or you can replace it with a proper install once you know it works. You'll then want to create a shortcut to create a shortcut to launch the program. Getting printers and shared folders working should also be possible.