Laboratory glitch, help needed

[Batman55]

The problem is after I go down the staircase in the Laboratory (I'm early in the game, in the Entrance Hall), the graphics kind of "double." It makes the game nearly unplayable and does not go away once it starts, not even after leaving the area. It's not present when loading from the Laboratory, but it comes right back as soon as I start moving around in there.

I searched around a little bit on this forum and have not seen this specific glitch mentioned anywhere. I have the retail version and have patched it to v. 1.01, before playing it in fact. So there is no issue of using a savegame from 1.0.

My desktop computer meets all the recommended system specs. I'm using Windows 7, 32 bit, and I have an ATI X800 card. My drivers are up-to-date. There are no longer any driver updates for the X800 as it's an older video card--it's moved to a "legacy support structure." Here is what ATI says on the Driver Update page for the Radeon X800:

"Note: AMD’s DirectX 9 ATI Radeon graphics accelerators are not officially supported under Windows 7. If the user chooses to, they can install the ATI Catalyst Windows Vista graphics driver under Windows 7. Please be aware that none of the new Windows 7 graphics driver (WDDM 1.1) features are supported (as the Windows Vista level graphics driver is limited to WDDM 1.0 level support). Using the ATI Catalyst Windows Vista driver under Windows 7 is not officially supported by AMD, and as such AMD will not provide any form of customer support for users running in this configuration."

The resolution I'm using is 1024x768, medium textures/shadows, all the "sepia, bloom" effects are turned on, however anistropic filtering and all SSAO effects are off.

Has anyone encountered this or figured out a way to get rid of it?

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I just tried playing the game with ALL effects off, including shadows, and the problem still occurs.

I was looking forward to this game for a while. Does anyone have any ideas here?