Surfing around I've found vague reference that ATI cards/drivers moved away from good support of OpenGL in these games and Nvidia gives better graphics. The reference mentioned 3450 range and lower works well, was written before the 7750 existed, and gives no driver details. So, no idea. A passively cooled card with equal or better performance than the FX1500 with the superior dual screen of this ATI is what I'm after. Superior dual screen means two (or more) 1920*1200 or 1080 where the mode never changes and (close to) equal performance on either monitor and and allows a full screen app not to disturb the other screen. The FX1500 did not do this while on the ATI is flawless. Full screen movie on one and Descent-dx2 full screen on the other, real work on one with some full screen on the other that isn't disturbed by the clicks, etc. And the real work could do with even more screen space! The FX didn't do a HDMI converted second feed correctly either.

IIRC, you must set "Catalyst AI" to "Standard" or "Advanced" for OGL 1.0-2.1 compatibility support.

I have looked around the driver settings and there is texture quality slider under Catalyst AI and an enable surface format optimization tickbox. The only opengl setting is triple buffering check. When something else is not going on and I can bsod, I'll change those around...

whats drivers are you using
catalyst 12.2 witha 6950 il2 works fine for me

Strange, it fixed itself, so far. I'm using 12.8, and without changing any settings I noticed some strangeness from some other older full screen games and got on the windowed path... almost everything looks better and has less delay windowed rather than full screen. But I hate switching modes, like the FX1500 has to. So with a second screen active I started cycling through starting with windowed 640*480 and up to the 1280*960 and both looked beautiful with all settings maxed and that great water...and then the full screen test all of a sudden worked? I just went in and out of both and still fine. PF doesn't lock the mouse within the window and has no 'escape', but that is something that rings a bell with some other issue, IL-2 is perfect. No idea. Maybe it's something else I had up, maybe on the second screen. Other test were Descent full screen with a movie on screen two, system sound for the game and HDMI sound for the movie = GOLD! And...windowed the game plays fine on screen 2! Don't remember that ever working well... I typically have a USB Flashscan hooked up with a log file on one screen and a tune opened on the other screen, my brain gets stuck and I flip into a game for a round and then get back to it...haven't tried that again yet.

Indeed, having something maximized on the second screen causes the bsod on start of either game. Why using DirectX other than OGL waits to bsod on close is funny, but, with nothing active on that second monitor and all is fine. Minor issue I guess.

All right, I fixed it. I made a second hardware profile, named it FX1500, found drivers much newer than the W2K drivers so it would be a fair test, let catalyst complain about some foreign GPU and ran the Quadro through the same paces that BSOD every time on the 7750 and what do you know... I've been slapped by ATI/AMD again. The Nidia Quadro FX1500 with newer drivers does everything perfect, including correct dual screen function. It's just a tad slower, some things maybe half, but perfectly stable. I should have ironed it out before I bought this HD7750. The secondary HDMI audio feed is useful though... Now a passive cooler option of some kind for the quadro and I'll be happy.

I used to have problems with IL-2 on a Radeon HD 6450 in OpenGL. Especially when anti-aliasing was on.
Noted this:
"For Windows XP SP3. With that HD6450 card I settled with driver version (20)11-10. Using atioglxx.dll from driver version (20)11-5 in my Il-2 Forgotten battles folder. Beware that not all atioglxx.dll's work with every driver version."

Pacific Fighters is notoriously bad to get working, i still havent had much luck with it.