Unpatched versions of Grim Fandango have been blacklisted, since the game is uncompletable on modern machines and we don't want to receive bug-reports for already patched bugs.
Are you sure that gfupd101.exe isn't corrupted? Which is the language of your GF version?

About the licensing problem of this fix, why don't you patch the script on the fly, before it's executed by the lua interpreter? I have made a simple proof of concept here: https://github.com/YakBizzarro/residual/commit/2b8d75e190e620c5e9f399563f2b0e95efa5a25f Moreover it also allows us to implement...

The last one, everything in the same directory. GrimDataDir key specifies the path to GrimData on cd.

Absolutely not

If you want to exctract patch files under windows without patchex, you can use a simply registy-hack. Create a patch.reg file like this (the data enclosed by triple-quotes): """ Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\LucasArts Entertainment Company LLC\Grim ...

The grim.tab is specific to each language, but the patch executable (gfupd101.exe) contains this file for all languages (English, Italian, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese). The update files for a specific language can be extracted with a tool called patchex, which can be found in residual-too...

The Grim Fandango patch is international and contains the grim.tab file for all languages. You can extract the german one with the patch exctractor in residual-tools with something like "patchex gfupd101.exe german".

Andrea