I've been getting to know the basics of Maya through PLE 5.0.
I've been getting frustrated though, as it seems that many dialogue boxes ,which in manuals show bountiful input fields, are completely blank in my version of the software.

Create NURBS Cube>options, for instance, is completely blank. While in the manuals there are all sorts of dimension and scale info.
While
Create Polygon Cube>options has one field with the default value of: 1.000, but no indication what that value represents, nor are there any other fields that I would expect to be in this box.

As well
Duplicate>options is completely blank.

There are others. But also, not all dialogue boxes are empty.

Did the installation go wrong? If so, why does the program work at all??
More importantly how can I fix it?