[spydrct02]

Sounds to me like your hardware acceleration is disabled. If that is the case, it could be caused by corrupt or missing DirectX files. I know a lot of stuff doesn't show on my Graal (v4) when my hardware acceleration is off. What's strange is it actually runs much faster when it is off -- there's no level load times or freezes at all. Which also wants me to bring up the fact that higher resolutions (with hardware acceleration on) like 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200 make Graal 4 very slow with level loading/rendering. It literally takes about 2-3 seconds to switch between levels.

Go ahead and go into dxdiag (start > run > type dxdiag) and see if it gives any errors during the Direct3D and DirectDraw tests (both are in the display tab). Also check the DirectX files tab and see if it says about missing files. Also, what DirectX version do you have? If you're correct on having the latest, it'd be 9.0c.