Garbage displayed on screen

I am trying to get SL working for a friend but there is a strange problem that I've never seen before.

Basically, no matter what video settings are disabled or minimized in the game or with the ATI software, I'm experiencing frequent sudden "spasms" of garbage being displayed on the screen as I try to move around in the game. The best way to describe them is rapidly flickering textured polygons or triangles starting with one point in the center of the screen and continuing to one edge fo the screen that obscure the actual SL environment from view.

We've updated drivers to the latest version and we've download 3DMark05 for testing. The bug occurs only in SL and not in 3DMark05, so the problem is either with SL itself or with a driver or video card issue related to a feature that 3DMark05 didn't use.

Only one other issue has arisen with this machine in the past: The mouse cursor would not display properly, and this was resolved after adjusting an accelleration setting in the video driver software's settings. However, we've tested SL with the option at all possible settings and it did not resolve the problem.

If anybody has seen these symptoms before or has any suggestions as to how I might be able to resolve this problem, I'd appreciate it a lot. Here are the PC specs:

400 W Power supply
MSI KT3 Ultra 2 mobo
AMD 2200XP+
Viking 512MB PC 2700 DDR 2.5 CL
ATI Radeon 9600 w/ 128 RAM (Not a third party manufacturer)
Maxtor 80 GB HDD (master)
Western Digital 120 GB (slave)
52x24x52 CDRW, 16x DVD
Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS
Linksys 10/100 NIC
Windows XP Pro SP2
Direct X 9.0C

Thanks!
--Skippy Spectre

Many people in SL with ATI cards use these drivers:

http://www.omegadrivers.com


Tweaked for better performance.

SL dont like ati¨s that much, you using vid drivers from www.ati.com ?, try the omega drivers http://www.omegadrivers.net , usually clears up artifact oddballness in SL.

Remember to use a http://www.drivercleaner.net before installing Omega's cause theres always something laying around after uninstall that can mess up.

doh

certainly try the driver options suggested by Weedy and Thili, but also bear in mind that if you had to turn down acceleration just to get the mouse cursor to work properly, there is a strong chance of there being a hardware fault. Your friend may need to replace his or her graphics card.