Can't get any particles in 2.46

Hi All
Admittedly I’m a newbie, but I am am to get particles to work in 2.45 and earlier. In 2.46 I get nothing.
No matter what I do I get neither any preview particles nor any rendered ones…
Am I missing something?

Thanks
Dugmac

What are your settings? What kind of computer are you using? What kind of video card?

Hi, i just want to add, that i have it too, that weird problem. I even downloaded and tried the examples from blender.org. I have a Geforce 6200, Athlon XP 2Ghz, ~900mb Ram on a Nf7 s -v2 Abit MoBo…WinXP/Sp2.
and another thing; if i hit the bake button for the particles in the boids example, blender always crashes…