Screen Flashes and then black screen before entering game

Okay, my friend is having problems with GW. He can get to the character screen, then it start to flash and a few seconds later it goes to a Black Screen. We have tried all the suggestions made so far, i.e. running nothing in the background and we know its not overheating b/c it can run Unreal Tournament for hours on end. Anyone have any other suggestions?

Gateway Computer:
XP Pro. w/ Service Pack 2
Intel Pentium M Processor 1.5 GHz
512 MB of RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600

Try running in Windows mode?

Windows mode? XP is Windows

I installed the 5.5 driver and it still doesn't help. I can get to the character screen and look at the one he somehow made, but as soon as I move the mouse, the screen starts blinking and then goes black. Could it be the graphics card overheating that quick? And a call to Gateway said that on the notebook we cannot change the Fast Writes option. So is there anything else we can try?

Means...in a sizeable Window. Not XP mode. We all know that is what you are using for a OS.
Window mode like any program out there...the browser you are using for example is in windows mode.

To change to windowed mode(easy way), just start game normally, then press Alt-Enter as soon as it starts(main screen). Theres other threads about similar issues, (now that its working ) try a search in this section for "video"(without quotes of course : ) )