I read:

...

what card are you using ?

RAGE MOBILITY-M/M1 AGP. I see. Maybe This is poor equipment.

By todays standards it maybe is, but it should not prevent you from running gem (I have a rage mobility p/m agp 2x) in my laptop and it basically works (under linux)

You could try to up/down/crossgrade your driver and see if it changes anything (I had _lots_ of strange effects running softimage on w2k with ati cards (but turning off / changing lots of stuff in their config panel seemed to help a bit))

good luck,

x