all the menus load fine and look fine. i have set it to load in 256 color mode and ive changed my resolution to the minimum required. i have a sony vaio laptop and my graphics card has 128mb ram on it so it's not that.

i have read other threads on this and have seen that some people have found that they have programs that are Always On Top and to turn them off works. but i cannot find any of mine that do that. i have icon packager, a component of object desktop, but i cant find anything that says it is always on top. i have objectdock, and i have turned Always on Top off. i dont have winamp, and i have closed my msn messenger and clicked exit so it's not even on the system tray.

what else can i do?

heres a screenshot of what i see, well actually i cant see the ground, only the outlines of worms and the targets and crates. this image shows the ground, dont know why

http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b186/londonlad87/worms.jpg

Stardock is known to cause problems with Worms.
Here's an old post about a similar issue: http://forum.team17.co.uk/showthread.php?t=25564. It says to disable Object Bar. In your case, you may have to disable Object Desktop.