Okay, status report... Turned of glsl - no love ran with -dx8 - no love there, either turned off pixelshaders - no love, but at least I wasn't all white anymore--I had some green and a little more definition. I also installed PlayOnLinux and tried Wine 1.1.44 (nothing happened at all), 1.2.2 (the usual white-screen-with-blotches) and 1.3.8 (same as 1.2.2) so my wine version seems to be less of a problem. glxgears works great so I know I *can* do 3d rendering. At this point, through the experiments and my in-house tech support (the mister), we're pretty sure it's the driver. So this morning, the mister is putting windows back on it. We're going to use a dual-boot with the windows there as backup/benchmark, and then I'm going to make a fresh install of 10.10 (either kubuntu or ubuntu--any guesses which will turn out better?) and start again from there. If 10.10 doesn't work, I might go back to 9.10. With the windows dual-boot, I'll have a sandbox partition to play around with. Once again, thank you so much for your help. I suspect next time I shop for a laptop, I'm going to make sure I've got an nvidia card in it. Jen
