ugh, I've been messing around for about a week now with my own problem
First the screen started doing lines across the screen. My first thought is my $1000 19 inch lcd display was a piece of junk. To fix the problem temporarily I have changed the monitor settings to brighten it up.Now my 3d games and applications are starting to act up. And without errror messages.( and I have a debug version as a programmer in directX )
I tryed reinstalling and updating the monitor drivers...
I tryed reinstalling the video drivers.
I even thought maybe reinstalling the directX may solve the problem to retail, and back to debug version, and the dx utility shows no indication of problems.. other then the tests itself show incorrectly..
That started getting me thinking more... We have an extra computer in the house. so I hooked my monitor to that... and it worked wonderfuly, not a single problem
With checking all these, the only thing left is the video card itself.( geforce2 GTS )
I've seen many posts that say to attempt a reset of the card. I will problably do that sometime today but it's not looking to promising. Even still it will give me a chance to clean out all the dirt.
maybe this information will be of use to others with a simular problem.