1 area light(all light types refuse to produce shadows) shadows on,  light in OpenGL preview,  OpenGL on everywhere...

....no shadows. 

I've gone back to old files where the renders have shadows, open up  the file, untouched,  and no shadows.  Everything shades just fine, but nothing casts or catches shadows. 

Could this be a hardware issue? I know it happened when I switched from  10 to 11--I remember catching it early on, and thinking it really wasn't important, because I wasn't using the comic book  render very much, if at all,  but I use it a lot now, and it's becoming a serious time waster having to  render shadows separately and then  combine them in Photoshop.