Help if at all possible

I need help please. My girlfriend and I play EQ and 2 days ago her voodoo banshee finally gave up the ghost. It was 16MB and we went down to Staples and the guy said the Geforce FX 5500 oc was a good gaming card...I'm not very good with the technicalities of video cards so I had the Staples guy install it as well. The pc is an AMD Athlon 801 Mhz with 640 RAM...and the fella installed drivers from the disc. After re-connecting everything , it was time to test drive the new card. EQ has a patch that loads you into the game after a file check...this looked very promising as the display appeared quite vibrant....as soon as it was patched thru the monitor went completely red with a barely distinguishable outline of what should be there. Uncool. A few friends had me uninstall the game...uninstall the drivers..then reinstall drivers first then the game...same red screen. Uncool. Went to EQ website and DL'd newest nvidia driver...same red screen. Uncool. I have also went to windows update to check for driver updates...rolled back driver in device manager...and am thinking of taking it back to Staples and getting a Radeon 9500...is there any chance of fixing this?

 

If the "sales" guy told you the Geforce FX 5500 was a good gaming card, then he is wrong.

The 5500 is an entry-level card. It's okay for average games, but anything demanding and it won't cope.

That isn't related to your problem though, and putting a fast card on an outdated system like yours would be pointless.

Try another brand or chipset, as it seems that there is an incompatibility.

Although video cards are supposedly backward compatible, they are only generally thoroughly tested on newer hardware.