Ok.  You have almost the same video card I do.  I haven't heard of any issues with that board on my techie sites.  How much swap file space do you have allocated and how much video RAM do you have on the ATI card?  I ask because a 32Bit system can only address a maximum of 4GB of RAM including what is on the video card and/or HDD Cache RAM etc.  So if you have a 512MB card, your system will only use 3.5GB of the normal RAM minus what you may have for HDD cache RAM.  This conceivably could influence any large scenes you may try to render but it shouldn't cause it not to load at all.  I doubt it is a Vista issue since I run Vista Ultimate SP1 on my AMD Quad core box and don't normally have any issues.  Like I said, I don't have the scene to do any extensive trouble shooting on so all I can do is provide general suggestions.  Does it have any problems opening other scenes or starting one from scratch?  You might also have gotten a bad DL of the scene when you bought it.  Try re-downloading it and see if that helps.  Wish I could help more.  Good luck.

Rich