I have posted on 18.0.112 regarding this problem. I have different manufacturers and specs of graphics cards running both XP SP2 and XP SP3. All machines fail to display images full screen, I just get a black screen. I have many thousands of images and this is a problem across the board not dependent on image type or size.
Videos are fine, Image edit is fine and full screen with other apps is fine. MC17 is fine (I previously posted that it was OK in MC15 which was true but I have tested with MC17 and it's fine)
Gappie confirms that MC18 can work on XP as his graphics card is fine so I suspect the problem is certain cards on XP (unfortunately all the ones I have!).
I found the following on 18.0.24 (8/7/2012)
3. Faster: Image playback starts and switches images much faster (the 3d system no longer forces textures to a power of two to use hardware mipmapping, please report any issues with specific video hardware).
I am not a graphics developer and don't really know what this means but I wonder if this is the relevant change which caused the problem. I can't find a download of a version of MC18 to try it but would be happy to try 18.0.23 vs 24 if it was possible to reference links to these builds please.
Alternatively I would appreciate any help from people on ordinary graphics cards on XP to say what card and XP version they are on and whether full screen image display works with MC18 for them.