As a Blitz3d user thinking about moving to BlitzMax, I'm seeing a lot of problem resolutions like that, which is worrisome. Is that what we are going to have to tell everyone who wants to download a demo, please update your drivers to the very latest?
that's OpenGL for you -- support is less than stellar on Windows, since most windows games focus on directX instead of OpenGL.
You can often get things to work by using the latest drivers, but it's somewhat of an issue anyway... Although supposedly there is a directX module for BMax on its way as well, which may be able to fix a lot of these issues.