John -- first off, I have seen similar reports of this display issue for SimPE under Vista, I didn't see this reported on the
SimPE forum so they may be unaware of it there (too many threads there to be sure). This may be something specific to Vista or a particular driver.
I see you have Windows Vista installed, is it the 32-bit or the 64-bit version? Did you install SimPE as the administrator? Have you updated with the latest .NET 2 updates? and have you tried using one of the older versions of SimPE? most of the additions to SimPE after the OFB release don't add anything of use for your current install of the game - I strongly recommend
0.58 no letter .NET 2 version (there was a thumbnail bug in Wizards of SimPE in one of the 0.58 versions - 0.58a or 0.58b - don't remember which).