Sorry I can't help directly, but for the benefit of others: Please post what kind of video card you have, exact OS version and service pack, and make sure you have installed the latest drivers for that video card.

Right. Here you go.

OS : Vista
GPU : Onboard ATI Radeon X1270
Catalyst® Control Center Version : 2007.0613.2249.38957

Date of only available version of VGA drivers from gateway.com :
07/07/2010

It's 110MB though, so it will take me a few days to download it, if their server lets me resume downloads part way through. Otherwise, there's no way I can update them.

The irony is that the part you need is probably 5Mb, all the rest is crap trying to get you to spend money.

3GB SDK? Jeez, that's bloated.

I built ex_opengl in debug mode using the libraries for MinGW 4.5 from the Allegro files page :

mingw32-gcc -Wall -g -I%AL502INCDIR% -o $1.exe $1.c -L%AL502LNKDIR% -lallegro-5.0.2-monolith-mt-debug -lopengl32 -lglu32 -lgcc_eh -static-libgcc

and then ex_opengl ran fine. Same goes for ex_gldepth, ex_glext, and ex_opengl_pixel_shader.

I then recompiled all 4 of the OpenGL examples in release mode :

mingw32-gcc -Wall -O2 -I%AL502INCDIR% -o $1.exe $1.c -L%AL502LNKDIR% -lallegro-5.0.2-monolith-mt -lopengl32 -lglu32 -lgcc_eh -static-libgcc

and they all worked fine as well.

FYI

So, I can't give you any reason why the downloaded example binary and the dll that came with it caused a crash. Sorry.

Probably true.

I don't see how that makes sense. The majority of the file size of my VGA driver is propaganda and enticement? To buy what? I don't think so.

So that leaves the problems with ex_display_options and ex_mouse_cursor :

ex_display_options :

[When the downloaded example is run]
Changing to a fullscreen video mode more than once causes the video mode to fail and minimized windows to spawn endlessly.

[When a debug version I compiled myself is run]
Sometimes setting a fullscreen mode partially succeeds - the screen is still 1280X800, but there is a 1024X768 area that is covered by the program, like this :
{"name":"603962","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/7\/07a425c77a607e4ddcdf44f85ab02483.png","w":1280,"h":800,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/7\/07a425c77a607e4ddcdf44f85ab02483"}

One time it rearranged all my icons - that's not cool. Also, after changing video modes enough (2-5) times then the program always crashes. I attached an allegro.log from one time the program crashed (first set FS 640X480 then FS 800X600). I also got a backtrace of another crash. It crashed in d3d_lock_region with a SIGSEGV segmentation fault on line 719 of d3d_bmp.cpp.

ex_mouse_cursor :
Both the 'Edit' and the 'Precision' mouse cursors only partially display, and display different parts of the cursor depending on where it is on the screen.

I'd suppose windows rearranges the icons for a smaller screen mode "to do you a favor" much like it changes tabs to spaces without asking.