drop down cascading menu does not appear

Hi all,

I installed blender 2.49a on a sony laptop that has a intel video card on the slackware 13 distribution. It seemed to install fine and the program opens and displays fine apart from the fact that no work can be done as there are/is no access to the controls. When the mouse curser is over the menu entry “file” the background changes colour but there is no drop down menu. Only does this on slackware 13. I know because on the same laptop I have sidux installed and blender has no problem running.

Does anyone know how to solve the problem or what could be causing the problem?

Cheers