Dell XPS 630I
Windows Vista
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
3325 MB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT


So here's the deal...

I was playing ArmA2 today and my computer locked up mid-game, with the graphics and colors messing up big time, along with looping sound. I was unable to alt+tab or get the task manager open, so I held the power button and turned it off. When I turned the computer back on, crazy things appeared on my screen as it booted up, including blue dots everywhere, vertical bars of green, overall messed up graphical glitches. When I get to the login screen, there are 5 vertical bars about 1 inch in width each and 3 inches apart, spanning the height of my monitor. The bars themselves are kind of like "screen tears", where the pixels are all different colors of the current window I have up, and they "dance around" whenever I drag a window around or move my cursor. I literally have to drag this window so that the line of text I'm typing falls under one of the 3 inch portions of my screen that still shows up non-blurry.

I've tried multiple times to uninstall and then reinstall my display drivers, with no results - the bars remain. I'm almost completely convinced this has something to do with my drivers or graphics because of many things I've noticed. I no longer have the "Nvidia Control Panel" option when right-clicking on my desktop. Also, my windows have been minimizing and maximizing not smoothly. When my computer was working properly, when I minimized or maximized a window, it would give the appearance of "shrinking" to the task bar or "expanding" from the task bar to my desktop. Now it just disappears and appears without the animations. Also, I used to be able to hover my cursor over a window in the task bar, and a mini-window would pop up, previewing what was on that window. That no longer happens as well. Lastly, when I go to Nvidia's website and use their online tool to check what version of drivers I have, it only shows as "--", meaning it doesn't recognize that I have any drivers installed at all.

I've been using the older 182.50 GeForce drivers because they were the only ones stable with ArmA2 (the other newer drivers I was using caused crash-to-desktops).

After countless restarts, checking the cable to my monitor, and re-installations of my display drivers, I'm all out of ideas folks. Any help or advice would be appreciated more than I could possibly show through the internet.

Hell, I've even tried launching ArmA and other games after reinstalling my drivers, still with these damned bars on my screen, and it gave me this error: "Display Adapter does not support format D24S8 for X8R8G8B8."