White Screen of "what the..???"

Hi all,

I have a Dell Inspiron 531 with Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit. I had a AV/AM scan going and after it finnished and I repaired, it required a restart. Upon restarting I walked away for a shot time and when I returned I found that my comp had locked up; so I did what anyone would do in that situation and hard booted.
After the initial boot I got the "Windows did not shut down properly..." "start normally","Safe Mode"... you get the idea. Well, I started normally and after Windows loaded I saw my desk top then about 30 secs later I got a "WHITE" screen. Windows was locked up again and nothing would work. Again another reboot and again another blank screen (this time beige) and then again in blue. (not the blue screen of death blue though.).
I loaded in safe mode, tried a system restore (didn't work) updated video driver (didn't work) so now I'm stumped...

Does anyone have any clue what could be the cause???

P.S. I've tried reversing startmenu changes I made
like not having the dell support load at startup but
that didn't seem to make it go away either.

 

To sum up, you get a normal screen in safe mode but a mono-colour screen in normal mode. You've rolled back the system to an earlier restore point and you've updated your video drivers to no avail.

This suggests a graphics card failure. What graphics card do you have? Do you have another graphics card to eliminate this as a cause?

 

You've summed it up nicely.

I'm using a XFX 9600 GSO (756 MB Ram) Video Card and as it happens the same thing happend on the other OS (XP Pro) I have in the same case. (long story)

As a result I had to roll back the driver and install an earlier version for that system. I suppose I'll have to do the same for the Vista as well.

I'll keep you posted as to the progress.

 

I ran into an issue rolling back the video driver and reinstalling it. I was finally able to get the system to see the correct device but the problem still exists.

only now I sometimes can't even make it to the desk top with out the screen going (Vista blue or white) and the PC locking up.

I can't even get into the recovery drive to recover the system back to factory. Each time I try it gives me an "Error" with no error code then closes out when I click ok.