Experiences with Diamond Viper VLB video card

Several problems:

1) The ad specified 16.7 million colors at 640x480 resolution with 1MB
   of VRAM, which is what I have. This color depth is NOT SUPPORTED
   with video BIOS version 1.00 and drivers version 1.01. A max of 65K
   colors are supported at 640x800 and 800x600 resolutions with 1MB
   VRAM.

2) With the 65K color choice I notice two minor irritations:

   a) Under NDW, when an entry in a list is highlighted (such as in an
      Open menu) and then is deselected, a faint vertical line often
      remains where the left edge of the highlighted rectangle used to
      be.

   b) With Word for Windows, when you use shading in a table, the
      display shows the INVERSE of the shading; for example, if you
      shade the cell as 10%, the display is 90% (the printout is OK).

3) The big killer bug is using the Borland C++ Integrated Development
   Environment. The problem occurs when you click on the Turbo Debugger
   icon (or use the Debugger option in the Run command), and the
   debugger application goes to VGA character mode (as it is designed
   to do). The screen goes haywire, and is largely unreadable. The
   Turbo Debugger display is all garbled.

   Through trial and error, I have found that when the disrupted screen
   is displayed you should do [Alt-Spacebar] followed by the letter
   "R". This instructs Turbo Debugger to refresh the screen, and it
   does this satisfactorily. I wish I didn't have to do this.

   The bug is more than with the Diamond drivers. The same disruptive
   behavior happens with the standard VGA driver that comes with
   Windows. There must be something in the video card that mishandles
   the VGA mode.
   
   The problem is not my monitor. The same bug shows up when I use
   another monitor in place of my usual one.

I still like this video card, and am hoping its problems will be
remedied (they do offer a 5 year warranty).
