Black boxes over buttons and graphic distortion

[YourITMan]

Hopefully someone can help with this problem we have on a customer iMac - its a 24inch aluminium running OS 10.5.8 Leopard.

This was dropped off to me with random graphical issues and a sick hard drive. We had the drive cloned and replaced but the problem with the graphics has continued.

If you have a message box with an OK/CANCEL style buttons on it the buttons will have black boxes over the top. Likewise, when you boot up the background to the users lists is black.

The address bar in Safari is black too. I can click in there and highlight the text and remove it but its still odd:

http://flic.kr/p/abadMU

Here is the other end of the Safari toolbar with graphic distortion.

http://flic.kr/p/ab7nmM

Any ideas? I'm going to timemachine back it up tonight and reinstall the OS but I'd rather not if I don't have to. Would be nice to reinstall the graphics driver if possible or force it to re-download through Apple Update.

Any ideas appreciated.

 

[Panch0]

try creating a new user account and see if it has the same issues. Graphic artifacts usually indicate a dying GPU, but those are normally more random. It looks like yours are actually limited to specific controls. That sounds more like some sort of user preference setting than hardware failure.

 

[YourITMan]

Thanks for your help. I'll try a new user tonight and failing that will backup using Time Machine and rebuild it and see what happens.

It does run hot but I don't get the crazy art-show that some people do!

 

[YourITMan]

This is now fixed. We created a new user which didn't solve the problem so bit the bullet and upgraded to Snow Leopard 10.6 from Leopard and ta-da!

No artifacts. No problems on the screen.

Happy days.