G’day
I’m just getting in Blender. Got 2.26 on a magazine cover-disc. But when I installed the it the interface gave me a headache. A couple of days latter I was given “The Blender Book” as a present. That had 1.7 on the CD which still looked bad but at least I could make out the button labels. Reading the book showed me that Blender could do a lot of cool stuff, that none of my other packages could touch. Thus it was worth trying to figure out the problem.
After reading the release notes for 2.26 which mentioned stuff about button transparences that I suspected may be part of my problem I decided to downloaded and try 2.25. The interface was still bad see screen-grab detail. 
I'm running Microsoft's Windows98 4.10.1998 on a AMD-K6 3D, box with 128.0 MB Ram and a 3DLab's "Oxygen VX1" graphics card. I finally got Blender on my box to look like the examples in the book by twigging the 'Control Panel' <Display Properties - Settings - Advance - Performance - Hardware Accelerations> down to what Microsoft describe as "Basic accelerator functions" But this turns off all the card's OpenGL features. See screen shot of settings that work for everything else I normally use. 
As Blender is an OpenGL package why won't the OpenGL optimization work? Should I have more or less 'DMA Sub-buffers' selected, or is it a OpenGL versions incompatibility thing.
Thanks in advance, Shaun