I just purchased Freespace 1, installed it fine, but the game immediately crashed upon launch. I've tried running it in compatibility mode and at 640 x 480 resolution, but nothing works. I have a Thinkpad T61 with a Quatro NVS 140m video card.
Any suggestions?

A specific description of what error you get when it crashes sure would help a lot.
Also, you can setup whether to use hardware accelerated graphics or not by running the Freespace.exe found in the the game folder and selecting "setup".
Other than that, I do not know - your graphics drivers are up to date, yeah?

Thank you for your responses. It's just one of those Windows errors: "Freescape has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." My drivers are up to date. I tried it without hardware acceleration, without success.
I ran dxdiag, and when testing DirectDraw, I get the following error: "An error occurred while setting your display to 640x480 mode with 16-bit colour (high color). Your computer may not support this mode. This is no necessarily a problem, though some programs may not work without support for this mode"
I get the same problem when testing Direct3D.
The dxdiag file reads as follows:
Display Tab 1: No problems found.
DirectDraw test results: Failure at step 17 (SetDisplayMode to 640x480x16): HRESULT = 0x80004001 (Not implemented)
Direct3D 7 test results: Failure at step 39 (SetDisplayMode to 640x480x16): HRESULT = 0x80004001 (Not implemented)
Direct3D 8 test results: All tests were successful. Direct3D 9 test results: All tests were successful.
As the dxdiag message said, the problem seems to be that my card doesn't support 640x480 mode. Would there be any way around this problem?

The Driver Version is 6.14.11.7715 and the Driver Date is 12/4/2008.

Its probably not your graphics card that is the issue, but rather the monitor/screen. Some laptop screens are not capable of running lower resolutions like that. You could confirm that by connecting your laptop to an external monitor that can do 640X480 and then trying to run the game.

I've been running it on an external monitor. Neither the monitor or the laptop works. On either, 800 by 600 is the lowest I can do.

Found this thread on the nVidia boards. Same model laptop, same model graphics card, same problem, but with GTA: Vice City and GTA 3. Something about that card or that model laptop just doesn't seem to play nicely with 640x480 resolution. The solution to the GTA problem was to hack the exe O_O
If you have Freespace2, Freespace Open and Freespace Port may be a way to get up and running.