[Help!] Extremely stange computer problem... possibly video card (laptop)

Okay... I was in tech support for nearly 5 years, and I never saw anything quite like what's happening to my laptop right now.

Okay, rundown on the system. It's slightly less than 2 years old, and it's a customized HP dv9000t model. It's out of warranty.
2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo
2 GB RAM
Two 120 GB 5400rpm Seagate hard drives.
GeForce 7600 graphics card (512mb dedicated version)
Running XP Media Center


So I leave my computer on stand-by one night. I wake up and bring it out of stand-by, to find that there are blue lines of interference on selected parts of the screen... mostly the lighter parts. Very irregular. I mess with my display settings, and notice that putting it on 16-bit color seems to lessen the interference issue. I bump it back up to 32-bit and look for other solutions. I try a system restore back to a couple days ago. Even though the system claims it changed nothing, that seemed to fix the problem for a few hours. Then it comes back as I'm browsing the BBS.

Then the screen randomly goes black, but I can tell the backlight is still on... it's just not displaying anything. I have to do a hard reset. This happens a few times...

...and to my horror I realize that all of a sudden, my computer now displays nothing until it gets to the Windows login screen (though again, the backlight is definitely on).

It's seeming to me now that there's something wrong with the video card, so I go into display properties and turn hardware acceleration all the way off and go to 16-bit color. Things stay status quo for about a day while I back everything up and ghost my primary drive.

Then, all of a sudden, when bringing the thing out of standby again, it randomly restarts, and I can see the startup screens again! So I figure, hey, I'll try going back to my usual graphics settings and see if it breaks again.

And it did. Once again, blue interference after about an hour or two. And once again, it won't display anything on startup, so I can't even get to safe mode or run a Linux CD.

Now I'm back to 16-bit color and no hardware acceleration, and my computer is playing nice again.




Does anyone have the first clue what's going on? I'm working on getting a monitor to make sure it's not my screen, but I'm pretty sure my screen is fine. My guess is my video card is having some sort of issue, and if I sent it back to HP I'm guessing they'd just replace the motherboard, which would cost me around $400 + service fees, I'm guessing.

If anyone has any ideas at all, PLEASE PLEASE let me know.

 

Really?

Any idea why it would sporadically not display anything before I get into Windows, but would do fine once Windows loads? That doesn't sound like a monitor problem to me... but I hope it is. It would suck a lot less than having to get the motherboard replaced.

 

Yep, I have the latest, and I tried re-installing them.