gnucash hangs on older account file

[Terry]

A thought:

Would it be possible to obtain from some nice folks an older version of 
gnucash, compiled as a standalone executable so that all the older 
libraries are not needed?

Say version 2.0.0

compiled so that it would work under Kubuntu 7.10 ?

It seems that a version that old would have a better chance of reading 
the 1.8.x account file properly - fewer changes.

I could then write a new accounts file with that version and then maybe 
the current Kubuntu version could read that file.

Would this be possible??

Thanks for considering.