Is Aero glass enabled as with two different cards like that I would expect you do not have Aero and so cannot support any of the animations.

Aero glass is enabled.

What does WindowFX say at the bottom right of the top half of the home page?

Desktop Window Manager (DWM) is enabled

Thats strange as with two different cards I would expect the DWM to be off.

Are both cards actually in use?

You could try upgrading your video drivers to see if that will help, but the nvidia card is the lowest end DX9 graphics card nvidia ever made and WindowFX uses DirectX10 which means the drivers have to emulate and it looks like it simply cannot do the job.

Neil - Thanks for the follow up. Yes both cards are in use. Regarding each card. I have disabled each card individually and on both cards I've gotten the same non-functionality and application failure.

I did some testing on a secondary machine (with only the Intel G33/G31 Express card inside) and it has produced the same results. So I guess I do not have the functionality due to outdated hardware.

Is there a system requirements listing publicly available somewhere? Besides the basic information listed on the product page?

System Requirements

Windows 7/Vista/XP (32-bit only on XP)
1GHz Processor

50 MB Available System Memory
100 MB Available Hard Drive Space

Have you tried updating the intel drivers?

I suspect the problem is the intel G33/G31 and FX5200 are both very early DX9 graphics chipsets and they run the DWM in Windows 7 in Windows Vista mode.

Unfortunately they are both running the "latest" drivers, so I guess I'm out of luck. No big loss, it runs great on my laptop. Thanks for all your help.