Radeon 9700 opengl errors

I recently built a new machine with a p4 2.53 and a radeon 9700. I decided to see how good the torque engine runs with all the opengl effect settings for the card maxed out, like FSAA and Anistropic filtering etc. I got a new hardrive as well so i couldnt test my compiled sdk at first so i decided to test the RW demo and see what happens. The GG splash screen and torque logo are overlayed on startup and when the menu gui opens up the whole screen is black except a small square around the cursor that will move along with it. i can, however use the square to navigate the menu and max the resolution on the torque video options and load the demo.
When the loading datablack screen comes up it flashes a black screen ontop of the normal menu rapdily and the game loads. Once in game, however there are no such problems and the engine looks awesome with the new card and settings. The anistropic filtering makes the texture quality of torque rival any new game except maybe UT2K3. the 9700 is awesome however its got D3D bugs at the moment with other d3d games like UT2k3 and mafia.
When i try to load the demo in d3d its rather choppy, but doesnt get worse no matter how high i crank up my settings. The d3d rendering has always paled in comparison to opengl on torque. My previous machine had an 8500 and i never had any of the opengl menu errors with it and it looked awesome too with all the tweaks. Im just rather curious as to why it happens only on the menu screen. Any ideas?