Thanks for the advice, gave it try but wasn't much change sadly. A little good news though, forced it to run in OpenGL mode by writing SET gxAPI "OpenGL" in the WTF file and managed to get about 4 seconds of playtime before the freeze so looks like a graphic card driver type of problem which gives me a direction to go in. Off to the ATI site to see what those chaps can do for me! :-)

Cheers!