I was pleasantly surprised that UFO Aftershock actually has a decent tutorial!
Unfortunately, all the figures within a mission (friendly or enemy) are appearing as
white shadow outlines.....no color of detail of the figure is filled in. The colored "name"
tag IS showing up fine, however. An unpatched bug, or unique to my game?

Update your drivers?
Sorry but about all I can think of as Aftershock was always incredibly buggy for me as in it crashed so often that I found it unplayable.
(Last time I tried(disk version) it was last summer, and with Catalyst 9.07(IIRC) & 4850 the graphics displayed OK, but it still crashed frequently...)
[EDIT]
Aftermath(disk) & Afterlight(Steam) worked fine for me but Aftershock kind of killed my idea to pay through all 3 in order. Also installed UFO Extraterrestrials which has some mods that make it very close to X-COM, or at least as close as any modern clone is, and it's turnbased tactical combat. (IAfterlight has fan patches compiled from the source as Altar, apparently gave the source to some community members. I never played it before the fan patches, but maybe that's why Afterlight is so stable as it looks to be the same engine as Aftershock and alot of re-used assets...)
[/EDIT]

Try lowering some of the settings and playing with that, also what type of video card and operating system to you have on your PC? I can help more when I know more.

I'm pretty sure I screwed up. I forgot that my video card burnt out, and I had to put back in the original card that came with the computer, an ancient MMX Nvidia card. Not good enough to even play this old game......

That's it. The minimum is a GeForce FX 5700. MMX are nutted cards.

Last part almost made me shoot water out my nose. Never heard of a vid card referred to as nutted but it's the right word nonetheless.