Game stalls PC, monitor goes black when clicking icons in top right

Game stalls when clicking ANY icon in the top right corner (civpedia, civics etc). The monitor goes black. I have to ctrl-alt-del restart.

AS Rock 939 Mobo
1.2GB Kingston RAM
AMD Athlon 64 3700+
ATI Radeon 9600XT

Try playing the game in a window (edit the ini file). I guess it won't help, but perhaps it will show some error message.