Gregory,
Sounds like some sort of basic configuration problem. What kind of
rendering board, video board do you have? What's in the config.sys? Does
your machine have any shadow ram or memory caching enabled (not always a
problem, but now and then…)? Often this kind of a problem comes about
because of some conflict over memory usage. Memory managers (such as QEMM)
sometimes need to be told to leave certain blocks of memory alone. If you
are using QEMM, try using the analyse option (see QEMM menual) to determine
if all necessary blocks of memory are being excluded. –PhilD [ADESK]