Client video issues. Need help pls

I have searched the knowledge base for answers. There's an adventure that has gone in circles every time I have TRIED to use it!
Anyway, I have a problem witth the grfx detail settings on the client. The enable ripple water and avatar vertex program settings are greyed out. Rippled water is checked though.
On avatar rendering, I have only the normal setting to work with. The other 2 settings are greyed out.
I do have windlight installed, but I'm not using it as the primary client
I have tried reinstalling my grfx driver to no avail.
The video is dual Nvidia 6800XT on SLI.

Anybody have any suggestions for fixing this?

I have the exact same options greyed out.
I have windlight installed, but use 1.18.2(1) normally.
I have tried many driver versions.
My video is dual 6800GT in SLI.

If you use the windlight or newer clients, you'll have all the options available if you specify 'custom'.
1.18.5(3) and the Nicolaz BE-V thats based on it are greyed out also (i just checked).

I'm assuming it's a hardware detection problem (with our generation of video cards) in older viewers. The cards support those features and work just fine with them enabled, it's that the older viewers were too dumb to recognize that