Strange window ghosting

[slapguts]

Lately as soon as my Mac gets a little bit warm, these start showing up. I've tried the PRAM and SMC resets, repaired permissions, all the general usual fixes.

1st Gen. MacBook Air, 1.6, 80gb HD, Snow Leopard, fully up to date.

 

[r0k]

I suggest you create a test user account and log in and see if the "ghosts" occur. If not, then it's some software going on in your account. If this were a hardware issue, I'd expect to see artifacts everywhere on the screen also affecting desktop icons and even text within each window. Since it only affects window borders, it appears to be software related. The fact it takes time to show up after your machine "warms up" might mean there is some slow process that needs to complete before this issue takes effect. Does it show up if you sleep and resume? How about a reboot? If it clears up after a reboot and shows up after "a while" it still sounds like a software issue. Since you have a MBA, it is easily withing Applecare (if you decided to purchase Applecare). Have you talked to Apple about this?

 

[slapguts]

Once they show up, they stay for a couple hours. A restart will make them go away, but a log-out, log-in or sleeping the laptop don't. They move around quite a bit, too. Sometimes the dock will have the borders, sometimes even Dashboard will have them. I guess I'll have to check in Console, see if any specific even happens at the same time.

My hard drive has been making some very strange noises lately, as well. A short series of clicks every now and then, not just the single click of the head parking. I'm covered under AppleCare until May of 2011, so I'm not too worried.