"Noise" display - loss of sync? refresh problem? cause?

[zapp22]

gang I confess this is a Vista-related problem but I need an idea or three.
this is a good fast hp minitower, Athlon x64-based, that I previously CAREfully reworked Vista Business on and had it lean/mean/clean and fast. A year later it needed work - when booting up normally and logging in to the main User account, the display is "fried" - it displays a regular pattern of wavy lines with no image, nothing readable. I cleaned it up and got it displaying normally again. Two days later, issue recurs. No malware, no odd things running in the background. On a second, debug-only account, I log in and everything looks fine, but nobody uses that one.

I'm baffled by what could be causing this? I don't want to just "dumb down" the display settings and hope for the best... that's a non-answer.

is there some issue with desktop-image-display? themes? Aero? sunspots ??

 

[bulletng]

From the sounds of it that may be a hardware issue although you make it sound like it's user related. Depending on your definition of 'wavy lines'. Could be the GPU or the monitor. Try troubleshooting both.

 

[zapp22]

worked on it today. it appears to have been a symptom, in fact the Only symptom I could find, of a rootkit infection that had evaded detection by previous scans using Malwarebytes and AVAST - both updated etc. I got suspicious when it went symptomatic while I was at a Windows Recovery screen - thus, pre-boot... while I was deciding whether to just try the normal bootup it flipped the display and seemed to lockout keyboard. looking at the display very carefully it looked like a set of characters arranged in a pattern. the types of display intervention I've recently seen in malware is way more creative - FBI Warnings or Fake Facebook advisories, stuff like that. still, I started working on it and noticed two different P2P apps - always a red flag. while first uninstalling, then deleting the folders left behind, something tried to hide and AVAST caught it on the fly this time. Took awhile but it looks to be clear now. very strange day. Kredit Kaspersky for their TDSSKILLER - good things come from the KGB!