I think "Game Root" is referring to the location of the game folder.
Maybe it's looking for the saves in the game folder instead of in My Documents where XP tends to put them.
Or maybe it's just messing up.
I played this game years ago without any glitches or problems even though I know that many people had trouble playing the game.
Do you remember whether you played the game in XP the first time you played it?
The installation on Windows 98 was very fussy, and you had to install things like Media Player 9 in a certain order, but once installed it was reported as being more stable on Windows 98 than on XP (as long as you had a 128 MB or more video card, which was not that common for adventure gamers at the time).
I actually have some old saves from this game, but they're from playing on Windows 98.
I have a note saying:
"Folder for saves is GameData folder that is inside Forever Worlds folder. "So that might not work for XP.