That is strange. Are you running XP? I assume its not Vista as that would have an XP compatibility option. XP doesn`t for the obvious reason that it already runs in XP-compatible mode
But it does look like some little glitch in windows that gets got-around if you run it in NT-compat mode. Certainly I have never seen this happen before and I run it here on XP Home, XP Pro and Vista without any problems and without having to use the compatibility settings