Well, as I mentioned before, I have a Radeon 7500, and have the latest drivers installed in XP, and in Linux am using xfree86 4.3, and DRI.

I get the following errors:

In Windows XP:
AppName: blender.exe AppVer: 0.0.0.0 ModName: atioglxx.dll
ModVer: 6.13.10.3036 Offset: 001baa8e


I thought I could fix the problem by removing .B.blend as described here: http://www.vrotvrot.com/support/showitem.php?faq_id=1354

But apparantly the file doesn't exist in Windows XP...

So..... what I did was renamed atioglxx.dll in /windows/system32 to atioglxx.cop as described here:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:S4nsbqyQDp8J:pub19.ezboard.com/ftreditingzonefrm2.showMessage%3FtopicID%3D776.topic+atioglxx.dll&hl=en&ie=UTF-8


And now everything works again!!!