Video Card Shot or some messy Virus?

So heres my problem

In about August/Sept I started seeing problems with my video card. When I boot up it does the windows XP Splash screen fine. After it loads the login screen and changes to a better resolution the refresh lag is intolorable.

What happens is every action I do(typing, mouse movements) causes the screen to refresh. Each refresh takes about 2-3 seconds. When the screen comes back up the single change is made and it refreshes until all changes are done.

So I thought it might be viral and I formatted my C:\. I have about 5 partitions(c:\ documents, dev, apps, media) and didnt format my other partitions.

After I formatted c:\ I still get these problems, but only after windows boots. The windows install process is fine, the windows splash screen is fine.

Has anyone else seen this? Does it look like I need to replace my video card? Or could it be viral and something is loaded in the MBR or deeper?


My Specs:
NVidia 4200 (64Mb)
1Gb Generic RAM
MBit Mobo
AMD 2000+ Processor

What do the shed'ers think?

I wouldn't consider it a video card problem as you said it's fine through the booting process. Maybe a conflicting driver that gets loaded on startup or a virus, like you said.

Have you looked in the Task Manager to see what is running? It sounds like the computer is just totally bogged down. Take a peek in the Manager to see if the CPU and memory usage are really high, and what is doing it. Get and run AdAware and AVG antivirus on all partitions. Also try running HiJackThis and posting the log in the anti-virus forums.