Looks like the video card is going bad. At least I hope that is the problem.
Any recommendations?
I would describe symptoms, but don’t have time to type it at the moment.
As in recommendation for a new card ?
If you are doing audio only and have only one screen, a fanless Radeon 6450 can be picked up for next to nothing and a 6570 for just a little bit more although the latter is more difficult to find fanless, these 2 are ideal for audio due to them being noiseless, make sure it is a 1gb card and not a 512mb one as Randeon chips unlike nvidia have a much faster 2D acceleration if the whole addressable memory range is used.
If you are a gamer you would want something more like a 68xx radeon although those will be much noisier than the above, but an acceptable trade-off, having said that the 6570 is no slouch games wise, just not near the top of the tree.
For audio only multi screen use a budget Nvidia Quadro pro card like the Q 380 if you are using 2x 1600 x 1000 or Q 580 if you are using resolutions like 1900 x 1000 or higher per screen, this is due to a much better driver quality and longer term support than what is on offer from AMD/ATI professional cards rather than better hardware. You can get away with using a q 380 on a 1900 x 1200 x 2 as I am doing but the speed difference between it and the Q 580 is noticeable at those resolutions but not at the lower ones.
For old AGP battlehorses fanless or low speed fanned Radeon 4650 can be found new, will not work in Vista/Win7 64 bit or if you are using quad or 6 core AMD processors if the mainboard chipset is Nvidia 3 250 though (but will work on AGP chipsets from SIS, VIA and AMD/ATI regardless of OS and core count), for that to work you can get hold of Nvidia 6200 which is the only Nvidia AGP currently made and does allow the Nforce 3 250 to run multi-core/64 bit.