No vehicle Enter/Exit Animations?

[Spitfire24]

I played planetside in beta, and had all the entering and exiting animations for vehicles. Now, when I exit or enter a vehicle, it brings me directly to what you'd normally see after the animation. Instead of just letting me do stuff though, it displays a one or so second "ready meter" where I can't move or shoot until it goes away. This is just annoying me and I'd like to know if there's any way to get my animations back. I'm running a p4 2.4 ghz with gf4 ti4400 and 384MB RDRAM(PC800). Graphics are on medium but there's no option to turn those animations on.

Also, how do you get those information boxes back that tell you that you've advanced a battlerank and what you can now do with your new abilities?

Thanks a lot!