Video Hardware Error now causing slow boot up times

The other day I opened up a YouTube video and before it even started playing, my whole computer crashed. And crashed hard. At first it just froze, but then my music started looping really quickly and the entire display just got all "colorful" and pixel-ly. It's hard to describe. Anyway, I had to shut off power to my comp. by turning off the entire power strip.

So there have been no real damages except that the boot time went from about 46s to about 170s. I have done a lot of Googling and researching and I seem to have narrowed down the problem.

In Action Center, in the Reliability Monitor, there is a red X in the "Windows failure" row. When I click on that day, it tells me that there was a Video hardware error on 9/26/2011 at 6:28 PM, followed by "Windows stopped working" at the same time, and then a "Windows shut down unexpectedly" at 6:34 PM.

When I open Event Viewer, all my Event 100 (boot ups) are now marked as critical, starting at the first one at 6:36 PM on 9/26/2011. Clearly this is not a coincidence, so something in that Video hardware error is now causing Critical boot-up issues.

I compared two Event 100s side-by-side, one from before the crash and one from after, and I'm noticing that the largest difference is in BootSmssInitTime (126845 after, 10736 before). I have tried Google on this one extensively but with no luck. So would anyone know what the problem seems to be and if so, how I can fix it?

Thanks for all your help.

Any display distortion may indicate an overheating graphics card or a defect
Update your display driver