I ran some of those examples. It would appear that any code that gets rid of shipRTex before the declaration of the Sprite ship produces a window which appears to never be cleared. (i.e. It's a window that displays what used to be on the screen before it appeared, rather than what I want to be drawn there.)
Also, for some information on my graphics card, I'll quote an earlier thread.
I checked out the examples, and I was disappointed to find out that the Shader example didn't work. I updated my graphics driver, hoping that it would make a difference, but it didn't. I got this computer about 4 years ago, and apparently I'm using a "Intel(R) G33/G31 Express Chipset Family" graphics card. Also, the driver update I got was about 3 years old. :|
So, what are my options?
Also, if it's relevant, I recently found out that I'm using OpenGL version 1.4.0
ugh