S-Video out: Radeon 7000 PCI -> Sony Trinitron KV-32FX60U - unreadable text and no video playback

I have a Dell machine which I am currently using as a home server. (XP Pro SP3, Celeron 2.5GHz, 512MB RAM). I have no monitor for it (usually use remote admin). It happens to be right next to the primary TV in the house (Sony Trinitron KV-32FX60U). With a view to using the TV to watch video files from the machine, I put a Radeon 7000 PCI card in the Dell (no AGP slots on the board; no other PCI cards in there) hoping I could use the TV through the S-Video out socket. S-Video output is piped into the AV3 input of the TV on the front panel.

1. The quality of the signal to the TV from the S-Video out port appears unreadable. While colours looked completely fine, on a command prompt window (font set at 8x12) an asterisk appeared as nothing more than a bullet point, an "m" looked more like an "n" etc. I installed the latest ATI drivers (8.252) and tried all available resolutions from 640x480 to 1920x1200, and refresh rates from 47Hz to 200Hz. Having learned that the refresh rate of the TV model is 100Hz I thought that would at least improve the situation but there was absolutely no difference on any resolution/rate (no worse, no better). Is there anything I can do to improve the crispness of the output, either by changing settings on the card, PC or even the TV?

2. I hooked up a Benq FP731 to the primary monitor output of the motherboard, on which I happily watched a short DIVX-encoded clip on the latest version of Media Player Classic. However MPC crashed when I tried playing the clip on the TV through the S-video output of the Radeon. Looking for suggestions on how to figure out why this might have occurred, and how to resolve.

Thanks in advance, experts!