Disabling the intro movie didn't do the trick - the game LAUNCHES in 1024x768, you get as far as actually hitting the 'play' button, it starts to load the game itself and then quits on ya.
Tried dumping the prefs file, no effect on this problem.
Forgot to mention that I seem to be having a fonts issue, too - some bits of text are replaced by a string of what looks to me like random characters, with "frutiger" mentioned somewhere in teh middle. Any ideas?