All of a sudden my video card took a dive on me.  I haven't been able to test a different card yet, but I figured I would ask to see if anyone else knew what to do. I have a Nvidea 8800 GTS. XP will boot as long as no Nvidea drivers are installed, but when I try to install the Nvidea drivers XP will fail to load and the text is all garbled up during startup.  Anyone know what could be causing this?  memory on the video card went bad?
You say that it started doing this all of a sudden. Does that mean that it was working properly before? What did you do right before this started? Did you download anything or install a new driver? Have you tried doing a system restore?I was actually burning a dvd and I noticed the the desktop picture I had started to show white lines throughout the picture and the start bar in XP. Nero also became unresponsive for a little bit (4 minutes) Then after Nero started responding again the screen flickered and went back to normal.  I restarted the computer after that and the FARTHEST it would get was about 2 seconds of the XP load screen.  Then it would restart and continue this cycle until I choose to boot in safe mode which worked.  I Uninstalled the nvidea driver and thats how I am getting XP to load in normal mode.  I wish I had another video card to test out but I do not.  Before I go out and buy a new one I wanted to rule everything out first.  I tried reinstalling the last Nvidea package from thier site, but I get the same thing after I install it.  XP will not load and continuusly restart.  I did try a system restore with no success.

Attached it a picture of how it looks right now in normal mode (all the dashes )

[Saving space, attachment deleted by admin]You have the wrong drivers installed...newer drivers are not always the correct drivers,
Boot to safemode...uninstall the nVidia drivers and use the drivers from the CD that shipped with the card,
Reboot afterwards...Thats funny...    Anyway, I tried installing the original driver on the CD but it still fails to fix it.  Even my mobos start up screen has the graphics all scrabled up.  Since thats the case it can't be a driver issue right?  The drivers do not load until Xp starts right?  Anyway, I am still stuck.  Thanks for the replys thoughSo your video card works fine as long as the Nvidia drivers are not installed? Even in BIOS? Is that right?
This is very odd.
What about a boot cd? Does the image appear distorted when you boot to another type of media?I am forced to load XP's SLOW generic drivers in order to load XP normally.  If I load any nvidea drivers it will not load XP at all.  No matter which drivers I have loaded the BIOS and dos start up screens are all scrambled up as far as the text.  I try booting the the XP cd and the blue set up screens look just LIKE the picture I posted.  Lines going through it and all screwed up.You need a new video card. Thats what I am starting to thinkMy dad's computer had the same problem. We were installing the correct drivers, but that would cause it to fail on boot. I poped the case, and sure enough the GPU fan was dead and the chip was burning hot. I'm guessing the 3d acceleration on your card is fried, which doesn't come into play until the driver loads. This is why safe mode works. Since he doesn't GAME, I just installed a generic driver that would do a decent rez, and it made a fine workaround.Before you assume it is doomed you should verify a few things:
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poped the case, and sure enough the GPU fan was dead and the chip was burning hot.

Even my mobos start up screen has the graphics all scrabled up.

You need a new video card.

man i am having the same problem right now i have a geforce ft 440 doing the same thing except to windows 7 i was playing wow in a raid about to pull a boss when it froze  restarted my comp started gettting those white lines and they it just stop working and if i try to load the comp with the drivers or anything or the graphics card in there it wontload windows it gives a me a blue error screen