ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hey, this is copy pasted from an issue a friend of mine is having:
"I start up the game, and I get a screen showing a couple of characters, the title, and a percentage bar saying 0%. It stays there and doesn't change at all, and if I navigate away from the screen, I can't get it to display again: it just displays whatever was under it when I select the program again, only changing the cursor. Eventually, music starts. It only seems to start after I've lost the visual, from what I've seen. Quitting requires going through the Task Manager; it won't respond otherwise. When I hit "End Now", the music gets stuck for about a minute and repeats the last blip until the program closes."
I'm unsure what his video card is, but I'd appreciate help finding out whats wrong. He has windows XP SP3 if that helps.

2 questions: What screen res. is he running it at & has he installed an earlier version. I had these results (in windows 7 at 800x600 screen res). Not sure if it'll be useful for your friend.

Install b41: Start-up screen appear doesn't move off 0%
Install b31: Runs. Change in-game res settings, load b41. Game now loads.

or

Change windows screen res to 1024x768 then install b41. Game loads.

Also with game speed:

Load b41 with graphics settings on: Engine loads slow, zone-loads slow, saves slow etc.
Load b41 in ascii then change to tile mode after engine loaded: Enigine runs fast, zone-loads fast, saves fast etc.

It's pretty much what I had - betas up to 38/39 or so were like trying to play marbles underwater, and the newest ones hung totally with those described symptoms.

It turned out I didn't have a video driver installed, at all - my XP fell off the back of a lorry, and I suppose you get what you pay for. Eventually I found the place where such things are listed (maybe Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Device Manager, dunno, memory fails) and a right-click on the big-fat-yellow-question-mark-where-the-driver-details-should-be brought up an option to update the driver ... sorted