My system is doing bad things!

[Whiternoise]

I've just recently started to have a LOT of strange things happen to my computer.

The graphics card dies in most games, and this is new - never happened to me before, i get anywhere from 5-30 minutes gameplay time and then it crashes completely. As in a black screen and the monitor not registering input. I've since decided that this is probably overheating (the card has an Accelero on it) - so i'm going to put in my old more powerful fan to see if that helps, i suspect it's the RAM. That said though, it's certainly not going over 100 - it's hot, yes, but the PCB is touchable (though very very hot). Curiously this started in Fallout 3 and then extended itself slowly to other games. I've had runs in Fallout where the game has played for a good few hours before blacking out - and then when i restarted it happened almost immediately. It also does this when running other games and the folding gpu application. Video playback is fine though. The odd thing is that the CPU and the rest of the system is obviously still working, sound plays in the background - though i think only what's been buffered, in games it causes dialogue to loop.

Whenever i login, i get this weird flickery blue screen a few seconds after the desktop has loaded. It's not a BSOD and it goes away after 10 seconds or so and XP loads normally. I thought it might be graphics related, but i'm not too sure. This does not appear in safe mode.

And now, i've got MASSES of slowdown. Whilst some applications are mostly usable - like firefox - others just crawl. I've booted into Safe Mode and there is no slowdown at all. Running various virus scans hasn't revealed much - although Nod32 thinks that server.exe is infected with an unknown virus. I don't think this can be graphics related, can it? I'll try running something vaguely graphical in safe mode - firefox is a bit laggy so we'll see.

My next plan is to create another user account to see if it's something to do with my current one. But any input would be much appreciated! I don't want to have to do a reinstall if possible - i might do a repair though.

EDIT:

Right, i created a second account and interesting things happen!

1. The blue screen still shows up, although this time it was a lot faster and looked almost like it was cycling - it appears at the same time, just before the Nod32 splash.

2. No slow down so far, everything is very very fast - leads me to think it's something i've got running at boot up. Although the list is almost identical on the new account..

3. I created a limited account, i normally run as admin, to see if it would help - but i don't know if this has affected anything.

Just before i rebooted, the system went poof again, this time when trying to load a last.fm artist profile. Couple of black boxes appear at the top of the screen, lock up, no keyboard response (hitting lock keys don't display lights) and no mouse response.

[Jay]

I think your graphics card is on its way out but I also think you may have a virus.

[Whiternoise]

Ok, update after a while!

It seems that actually server.exe isn't actually a MS file - so that got safe-mode deleted promptly. I wiped my graphics card drivers and reinstalled the latest ones that Nvidia had. This seems to have largely sorted things. I'm going to fire up Fallout to see if it still works fine without any crashes.

I've also swapped out the front Noctua for my old Akasa fan which is a bit louder, but should cool a lot better.