In this system, I mainly use Media Player Classic - Home Cinema, but it's an earlier version that runs on this older OS. On the few occasions when MPC-HC fails, VideoLAN's VLC media player (also an earlier version) does the job.

No need to worry ... both players displayed the video properly sized. But I was surprised to see MPC-HC's "save image" of the file's original elongated form, sans borders (standard DVD anamorphic is 720x480, with the borders). I thought you may have made needless resizings. However, I did miss the mention of "upscaling" in the description, which mislead me in what I thought you did. Technically, then, this is not a preservation. Rather, it's a restoration from a laserdisc. That was the confusal factor. Sorry. :)

And, yeah, that whole IRE thing tends to be more theoretical with me not doing much in the way of mastering. So I took a quick refresher course:

"IRE settings"
http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/201765-IRE-settings

So how does NTSC-Japan's IRE 0-100 (0-235) fit into this laserdisc capture for NTSC-US IRE 7.5-100 (16-235)? In the capture or post-processing?