Tuxracer crashes while loading

[kodos]

I'm having trouble getting tuxracer working on my alienware laptop. My system is all up to date, and I emerged in tuxracer. I can load it up and all seems well. When I go to try to race, however, a second or two into loading the course and associated textures, etc, it will exit, leaving X in the tuxracer resolution and with no mouse. I turned on debugging for tuxracer with the write_diagnostic_log true option but there is not fantastic warning or failure message. In fact, it gets to a different point in the log each time. All of this was in an effort to try to debug why quake3 wasn't working. Quake3 exit's with a signal 4...but that's for another post. I can't help but think that they are related though. glxgears runs fine at 1300-1450 fps. I'm using a 2.4.18 kernel with dri on my radeon 7500. Any help or direction would be greatly appreciated.