Got it all sorted out ( by dualbooting ), thanks. It was dumb on my part to forget opengl could be software-emulated.
I cant upgrade to 11.10 because that would mean that some tools would probably break from the backtrack repos. I have neither the time nor the motivation to try that though.
[edit]
I believe the bug i was having was due to kernel 3.2.6 not loading the i915 intel driver.