Has anyone else encountered a problem viewing the pop-up army strength panel of heroes and towns? When I right-click to view it, I can see it flash up and then immediately disappear. I've resorted to repeatedly clicking it trying to get enough glimpses to figure out what it says. I emailed support, but they responded with the suggestions that I mentioned I had already tried, namely switching the graphical mode and changing the compatibility level.

I am running it on Windows XP SP3 with DirectX 9.0c via VMWare Fusion 4 on Mac OS X Lion. I also have it running directly under Lion using Boxer. I'd be open to suggestions relating to either setup since the XP VM lives on my system full-time.

Thank you for any help.

After further experimentation and trail and error, I have discovered the root cause of the problem was a conflict of settings.

HOMM1's manual describes the view army / more info pop-up as being triggered by holding right-click. I am playing on a 2009 MacBook Pro with a "button-less" glass trackpad using the one-finger tap for left-click and two-finger tap for right-click. From what I have been able to find, it is not possible to "click and hold" using either of these gestures. You must physically press down the "button-less" trackpad to trigger hold events. Since Boxer overrides Command + 'Press' Click to lock the mouse cursor to the window, you must use Control + 'Press' Click to send the "right-click and hold" command to the game. Then the view army / more info pop-up works as expected. Alternatively you can attach an external mouse and not worry about 'press' clicking and modifier keys.

I am responding to my own question to make a record in the HOMM GOG forums in the hopes this information is useful to another confused Mac player.