Still battling. I tried unchecking the compress box and that didn't work. I have reinstalled it from about five different sources and it always comes up in black with yellow outlines.
Something tells me that it is not uninstalling . The last install I tried took about 0.5 secs to load 180 mb. When I went back to the 3d view tab it was still unchecked, it should have been checked by default on a new winstallation.
The laptop came out of storage three months ago. I erased to M1 standard all the partitions on the hard disc, followed by a full reformat. I then loaded a kosher copy of Windows XP followed by the drivers, AVG and Office, all kosher. XP was upgraded with SP2 & 3 and the IE was upgraded to I believe IE8. I then installed Google Earth, maps, toolbar and all the goodies. Until a week ago everything, but everything, worked fine. Everything still works fine except for this blasted Google Earth.
I am quite prepared to go through the whole thing again if only to get rid of whatever it is that is causing this.