Yesterday, my brother was trying to setup the MultiWii board from HK

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__27033__MultiWii_328P_Flight_Controller_w_FTDI_DSM2_Port.html

using his small laptop (Atom based "mini" book) running Windows XP.  The software he was using was MultiWiiConf 2.1.

http://www.multiwii.com/wiki/index.php?title=MultiWii_GUI

For whatever reason, the box on the top right of the image on the above link was blank (just a black box). It should have shown "Throttle" and "Pitch" along with "Roll", "Yaw" etc, which all should respond to movement on the transmitter sticks.

For whatever reason, this combination (MultiWiiConf 2.1 on Windows XP) seems to have this problem.  After spending a good amount of time searching, we found that the solution is to disable "Hardware Acceleration" on the display !

http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/global/disable-graphics-hardware-acceleration-windows.html

Basically, move the "Hardware acceleration" to "None", and restart MultiWiiConf.

http://www.deskshare.com/resources/articles/dmc_turnoffhardwareacceleration.aspx

Hope this helps others who encounter this issue, as the solution did not show up easily in Google searches.