pretty patterns lock up

[hangglider]

My father in law has just upgraded to windows xp and just afterwards installed sp2,everything seemed ok but every so often a pattern of vertical stripes appears on the screen each time they are different colours and backgrounds....the keyboard and mouse lock up (ctrl alt del) doesnt work, the only way out is to press the restart button
Any Ideas ????? :confused:

[MJCfromCT]

Windows XP upgrades have usually gone fishy for me. If there isn't valuable data on the computer, i'd recommend reinstalling XP, but doing a clean install this time instead of an upgrade.

If that can't happen, i'd uninstall the video card drivers, run a program like drivercleaner in safe mode to get rid of any leftovers of the drivers, and reinstall new video card drivers.

I'd also check and make sure there weren't any hardware conflicts in device manager.

[hangglider]

Sorry MJC it was clean install not an upgrade

[MJCfromCT]

ahh ok, in that case, are the motherboard drivers, video card drivers, and directx installed properly?