Well, I hate to say this, but, as far as I am concerned, this bug should not appear (unless you used different versions of the game, or added a bloom.txt to the folder in which the game can be found); it is either an internal GM bug or something connected to your machine or there is some detail you did not give. I suspect the first one to be the culprit.

Aha.  I went back and checked -- I had been seeing what the various cheats did, and I hadn't deleted bloom.txt.  Deleting that fixed it handily, and my apologies for not noticing that earlier. 

Found a bug on load of an existing character.  The error displayed in the Error Messages dialog is:

Code:

___________________________________________
ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object o_blur:

Trying to use non-existing surface.

At this point, pressing Ignore generates:

Code:

___________________________________________
ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Event
for object o_blur:

Trying to use non-existing surface.

and from there on out Ignore simply generates more and more of this message.  This happens regardless of the scaling mode I chose at game start.  I do have an nVidia card, and have been running non-scaled + full screen to avoid the surface transparency issue (though the error occurs whether or not I have it scaled or full screen).