SL Avatar Problems

I am running SL on a HP Compaq 8510p with a Radeon Mobility 2600HD card and windows xp pro sp3. Whenever I load into SL, my avatar is shown with a black skin. If I try to edit my appearance, all of the property windows inside the appearance window show in various psychedelic colors.

I've pulled the latest drivers from the HP website and also cleared my cash in addition to restarting the entire computer.

Any ideas?

Changing clothing helped me to get rid of the black skin/hair/items.

This may help you as well. (I have no idea why this helped.)