I noticed that if I have Anisotropic texture filtering on whenever I quit and relaunch VO it reverts back to linear filtering, but it still says it's anisotropic. Also, before I switch filtering modes the colour picker for ships is all blocky, but when I switch (doesn't matter which one), it gets really smooth.

eMac running Mac OS 10.4.6 with a 1 GHz processor, 768mb of RAM, and an ATi Radeon 7500 (32mb) video card.

Does a 7500 even support hardware antistropic filtering?

Sure, although I don't really think it's the same thing in VO. In other games anisotropic makes it so I can see things at greater distances with better quality, but in VO all I notice is the HUD looks less fuzzy.

Even the Rage 128 supported anisotropic filtering. Texture compression, too. (Scary, huh?)
-:sigma.SB

Anyone with a solution?

..Anyone?...
*crickets*

Yeah, there's a bug with our opengl driver not properly setting that setting on startup.