E1705 video problem

Hi all. I have an E1705 with an Nvidia 7900GS. I have a strange problem that has me baffled. I've had the notebook for a couple of months and everything has been fine. I'm running on a clean install of XP MCE with the latest drivers off of the Dell site including the 84.69 Dell 7900GS driver. This is my problem. Normal 2D stuff such as Windows, web pages and text applications are fine. Also 3D games are fine when you're actually in the game itself. Here's the kicker - a lot of in-game menus are corrupting. If you can make out the screen well enough to actually get into the game, it will play fine. As an example, flight simulator 2004. If you are in the create flight screen and quickly choose your plane and airport and click "FLY NOW", it will go right into the game and all will be fine. However if you take more than about 50 seconds the screen goes crazy. The video shakes around horizontally like crazy. If I can get to the "FLY NOW" button and click it, it will go into the game and it will be totally fine even if I fly for hours. Alot of my games are like this, the 3D game itself will be fine, but the in-game menus tend to go crazy. BTW, I also have tried the Dell performance driver as well as the driver right from the Nvidia site with the same results. I have no idea what would cause this behavior and any help would be appeciated. Thank you.

 

my ignorant suggestion is to dl any of the drivers you've tried or new ones but don't install yet. uninstall current driver and reboot. then install new driver/s and try that or reboot then try.

 

a driver uninstall and a run of driver cleaner pro would be a good place to start, also, corruption problems like those you are talking about are common when using no cd cracks, so if your using any, uninstall the application and reinstall without the crack, and the problem will likely go away

 

Try installing latest driver from the Nvidia website.
Try different games. Run 3DMark, check for issues (visual artifacts, etc).
Is the fan for the video spinning? What's the video chipset temperature?
If it's the same, maybe you have issues with your video card's memory.