im just startung with blender. after opening STAGE.BLEND i recognized that some icons dont appear in the gui. in the Qickstat.pdf i found screenshot of the STAGE.BLEND scene. in this screenshots are around 10 quadratic icons in the left area of each header located. they looks like controling object movement, pan, rotate or paint. i found that for most of them are shortkeys available but for a beginner it would be great to get some gui support. i installed blender on a second pc - same results. the graphic boards of the pc´s are ati and nvidia quadro fx. at least i tried to run blender´s osx-verion on a g4 powerbook uder 10.3. in this case the program even won´t start.
blank, or black buttons are the fault of the graphics card
however, I believe the problem is that your tut or whatever is for an older version of blender, since 2.30 or so the interface has changed and many functions that were on the header of various windows have moved to a menu on the header of those windows.
thanks, meanwhile i also got the feeling that the functions are moved to other places… have to find newer manuals (or the new places) - espacially for the realtime-stuff.
do you have any idea about the osx-problem?