Hi, I’m fairly new to Blender, but I do know how the basic mesh & texturing works. The only problem so far is that whenever i go to use the stucci texture on my material and select Nor, it crashes upon rendering. Am I correct in thinking the problem has something to do with bumpmaps? Would my video card be to blame?
Most craches in blender are caused by the video card driver.
it crashes upon rendering
The fact that it craches at this stage points toward the driver
I agree, it is probably the video card and or driver. My desktop used to run Blender just fine with Win98, but then I upgraded to XP. The XP video driver is incompatable with Blender, so my Blending is now restricted to the Laptop. 
Warren
Did you upgreded your drivers after intalling XP? By default, XP instals crappy drivers…
Martin