Display issues in Maya

Hi all,

I'm having two problems with Maya on my new laptop. Everything installs fine and
I can start the program, but the first issue I run into is a display error. If
you view the attached files, you can see that my view panels are cut off beyond
a specific resolution. It looks like perhaps they are wanting to display in a
non-widescreen format but my laptop is widescreen? If I make the display panel
smaller by doing something like switching into the 4channel view, everything
works. 
It's just in full screen that I lose any display beyond a certain point in the
view panel. Has anyone experienced this before? See below for my comp
specifications.

My other issue has to do with the "Fatal error. Attempting to save in
C:/xxxxxxxxx/xxxxx.ma" problem that I've seen floating around. For me, the
issue occurs when I try to close the program. Really this is just a nuisance as
I can operate and save and generally use the program well, but when i close it I
have to deal with 
this error message. I've read that this has to do with triple buffering on my
gfx settings, but I've turned that off and still have troubles. Likewise, most
of the people with this problem seem to experience it on opening, rather than
closing the program. My computer specs are below.

Thank you for everything!

Computer Specs:
Dell Inspiron 1420
Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 1.8ghz
2gb RAM
160gb hard drive 5400rpm
Intel 965 Express (x3100) Chipset Family (GPU)
Maya 8.5-2008 (tried both)