Using the old opengl32.dll didn't work, unfortunately. The problem still persists. 

ATI / Valve barstuds. 

It's actually Nvidia but yeah, bastards. I don't even see how this driver update manages to screw with the 3d view, since I don't have it set to use hardware acceleration. Wouldn't it just use the CPU to render the 3d view?

I don't know, and I can't use old drivers forever. 

Orl i never had problems with nvidia :| and i always had nvidia grafic cards 

try to disable desktop effects 

Like what, exactly?

The only thing I can think of is aero, and aero has no conflict with Worldcraft, as old as it is. 

Radiant needs desktop compositing to be turned off to work properly in Vista. This will disable Aero while the program is running. Recent versions of NetRadiant do this automatically. You never know, it might work... 

But I'm not using Radiant. I am using Worldcraft 1.6.

But alright, I'll accept the fact that there is no fix for this, and that Nvidia is solely to blame. This is not a Vista issue in any way, Worldcraft works perfectly fine in Vista. This is Nvidia's doing. 

society caused this, Orl. 

I'm drunk, я пьян, блин это просто пипец с телефона сидеть тут, особенно по пьяне 

I can't use old drivers forever
Do you have an older card? If so, using the latest drivers is not always recommendable. 

Upgrade to WC3.3?

If both ATI and Nvidia have problems then it seems stupid to blame two different companies - maybe the software architecture is just bad. 

My current card is an 8800gt, only about 2 years old. Why wouldn't upgrading to the latest drivers be a good idea?

I haven't tried WC 1.6 with an ATI card, do you know if it has the same problem, or a similar problem? 

WC 1.6 is a very old program, designed for Windows98. In WC3.3 I have occasionally encountered a bug where you cant select faces in the 3D view, and you can then only grag the view around in the 2D views and cant select anything. Rebooting the computer fixes the error. I always use the latest drivers for my 8800 card, in XP32. Forceware 186.16 is the current stable build, and works fine for me.
Orl - I recommend you make the transition to 3.3 because it has many other improvements over 1.6/1.6a, i.e. texture lock works properly etc 

Because at some point drivers tend to put the focus on new(er) cards and contain changes that may result in worse performance (or even glitches) for old(er) ones. So sometimes it's wise to stick with an older version if it works fine (and if newer ones don't seem to bring any visible gain).
I don't know how it is with a 8800gt (or two year-old cards) - it takes a bit of experimenting with driver version. 

Is worth the change overall. The texture control is a huge bonus.

It has its quirks, but you get used to them. The only ballache is converting the textures, that is automated thanks to Baker's pack, but when it doesn't work it's frustrating. 

skip textured brushes cast shadows?
skip can be run after aguire's q1 tools? 

Yes.
Yes. 

going to build a shadow mesh for a large door out of skip then.

... except that i just realized... skip will cause the interior to be void... when the origin of the door travels through the skip brush, it might flicker or disappear? o.o 

Also players may find it hard to walk through the opened door with skip brushes there. 

in software renderer, a func_door surface that is coplanar with a structural skip surface will not be drawn. So make your shadowcaster thinner than the func_* object.

And what preach said, the skip will be collidable, so hopefully you have a plan for dealing with that :) 

your door won't disappear as long as part of the bounding box is inside a visible leaf. 

it is the bounding box that determines visibility then.
i guess i should have realized that. :P

thanks for clearing that up, and yes, it wouldn't be used for an actual door, but things like extending bridges (that aren't accessible anyway) or towers that move as well as rotaters. 

aguire's light.exe.
does it support coloured lighting normally?
i see that it supports -tyrlite95 which is supposed to do coloured lighting, but i can't seem to figure out how to actually get it to generate a .lit file.
also, is the spawn key '_color' or 'color'? 

aguirRe's light tool does not support colored lights by default AFAIK. You would need to add the "-tyrlite95" in order to enable it, but I never tested this feature. I also guess you need to add a "-lit" option in your command line in order to enable .lit file generation, but I'm not sure. Also, the spawn key is "_color"...
Experimentation is the better school there ;)