I had a demo of q3 team arena, which played fine on my system
pIII 1000 128mb ram
geforce2 mx 32mb
dx 8
I tried various drivers (bog standard, 10.80, 12.40, 12.10). and all was well.
then one day it just wouldnt load, it couldnt find some config.cfg file. so I uninstalled it & got q3arena. now q3 wont do anything, the screen goes grey and the computer frezzes I have to reset it alt+ctrl+del doesnt work.
Be aware, I came across the same problem when I first bought Q3A, the gray screen of death. I replaced the game disc, same problem, I had a voodoo 3 3000 AGP overclocked to 180Mhz from 166Mhz. I think that it overclocking my card fried a trace on the card or a component, because I replaced my card, and Q3 works fine. If you can, try another video card. Hope this helps.