Oh man. It's not as bad now with shaders, but I remember how horrible learning fixed pipeline OpenGL was. You'd try to write some simple code, the result would be a black screen, and you'd just keep adding glEnable/glDisable calls to your code over and over until you figure what invisible piece of global state was ruining your day.
Oh man, I'm not sure if I'm imagining it, but that sounds like me in 2012.