One issue I'm having: all the demo videos and tutorials show, say, drawing with the pencil tool. When they move the pencil tool near an edge, they get the hinting about Midpoint, Perpendicular, etc.

In order for ME to get those hints, I have to move the tip of the pencil tool about 1/4" away from the edge, surface, etc. on screen -- it's like the icon for the tool and the action point of the tool are not lined up? In fact ALL mouse actions (select tool, move tool, etc) seem to register about 1/4" below the tip of the graphical pointer...

I'm running on a Vista Laptop with 2G ram at 1680x1050 resolution on the laptop, and 1440x900 on a second monitor, desktop extended to it.

Rotating the 3D world inside the tool, disabling one monitor, or reducing the resolution to 1024x786 doesn't make a difference.

Any ideas how to solve this?

This is exactly the problem Tim Killen had with his teaching lab computers: http://blogs.taunton.com/n/blogs/blog.aspx?nav=main&webtag=fw-designf...
(3rd paragraph)

As you can see, Mr. Killen's blog is one of Fine Woodworking's blogs. The workaround solution for his problem is presented here: http://groups.google.com/group/Sketchup-Pro/browse_thread/thread/9f27...

Note that new computers ship with drivers that may be 6-months old (or older!) You should obtain the latest driver for your graphics card, and install it. There's no guarantee that it will be 100% OpenGL compatible, but it could indeed resolve this poor behavior.

See the SketchUp/OpenGL reference: http://sketchup.googlegroups.com/web/SketchUp_and_OpenGL.html