issues with toolset- Please Help!

[lailahaillallah]

Hi Everyone,

This is my maiden post so i'd like to say hi first, hopefully if i have the time to contribute i'll be able to become part of the NVN community.

So anyway, i fired up the toolset and started browsing through a few tutorials (special thanks to NW girl and others)

I made some terrain, put in some water and placeables, did a bit of texturing and added some grass and made one character and a small conversation just to test. I then baked the area and saved the module and closed the toolest and loaded the mod in NVN2.

One thing i noticed is that when it asked me to create a character - it didnt show a character model in the character creation screen. WHether or not this is relevant to my issue, i dunno.

ANyway, i finished creating the character and the module fired up and looks like this: (please see attached jpg!). No characters (either the PC or the NPC i placed in the area) are visible and none of the alpha mapping on the grass or anything is working.

I have a very new highend machine (asus p5e64 ws evolution mobo, 4gig ddr3 1600mhz, radeon 4870x2 graphics card) and run vista ultimate sp1, i have installed the ATI 9.3 catalyst drivers, reinstalled directx10, reinstalled .net

i've noticed some probs with the toolset crashing on loading etc and had to do some troubleshooting to get it to work and theres still some other problems with menus showing up "black" with garbled text on them (please see 2nd attached pic).

I am running the toolset in windows XP SP2 compatibility mode (although i dont think it makes any real difference?)

I am really hoping someone could help as I was really getting excited about the prospect of learning the toolset and modding in general.

Simon