I've got a Radeon 9600, running an Athlon 1.3 GHz system with 256 MB RAM. Memory, by the way, was not the problem: I ran Memtest for 4 hours, and it came up with nothing. We're stymied. The only thing we're sure of is that it isn't a software-based issue.

The only good news out of this is that my wife and I have decided to upgrade the CPU, motherboard, sound card and RAM, while keeping the hard drive, floppy and CD-ROM drives. We're looking right now at a 3 GHz 64-bit Athlon, with a motherboard that has 4-channel sound on it, and 1 GB RAM. That should not only make this computer ready for Gates' next OS and its crop of apps (which will be important to my job), but also give me a very speedy Morrowind with plenty of mods. It should solve my mystery problems of the moment, too, though I'd really like to know what's going on in the meantime.