Please ask questions in the help thread.
As far as old merchant programs they have modified the NPC tables and taken out the columns for event period or temporary NPCs and created a new dbo table to handle those columns.
They probably will not work without editing the program so unless it is open source you may be out of luck.
If you are entering a new NPC manually by script just edit the script so it does not contain those columns.
Here is the link for the help thread for your future questions that I am sure you will ask there...