It loads fine, but the menu screen that comes up is much too large -- i can see see part of the word "Quake" before it goes off the right side of the screen. I'm unable to do anything. There is a cursor for a moment, but if i try to move it, it goes off the screen immediately. Can anyone offer some suggestions as to how I might reconfigure to get this to work?

Are you updated fully? If so you might download SIKKMOD as it adds a few graphical editing capabilities the original doesn't

in your Q4base folder create a text file called autoexec.cfg add these lines into it correcting for my resolution for your monitors.

seta r_aspectRatio "1"
seta r_customHeight "768"
seta r_customWidth "1360"
seta r_mode "-1"

Having a bit of a problem with Quake4 as well. It runs fine, but the graphics look just plain horrible like they are set to the lowest setting even though it is set to high. Running on my laptop which has an intel core 2 Duo processor P7450 2.13GHZ, 4 gigs of ram and an Nvidia 9800M GS card. Had to change out the card on my Desktop which is now an ATI Radeon 7970 (upgraded from 5870), 6 gigs Triple Channel Corsair Dominator Ram, and a Core i7 920 stock speed processor, and get the same results with that as well. Should be smoking things with no problem, but i'm getting crap graphics.

Kind of svcks my old Intel P4 with 256mb graphics card can do better. :/