i have always the software updated.
sometime ago i searched in some forums about this kind of problem and there were some guys that had a problem with lines on the screen after they had done teh last update to 10.4.8 version of Mac OS X, but the screenshots there were really different and the problem had other consequences like the computer shutting down or the screen turning black.

i felt that this was rather strange, but i thought it was because i do not understand much about this things, as soon as i know what is the problem i will post it here (i really hope that by 15th of December i can have this thing solved)

(sometimes i write in English, i don’t know why, but it is good for me to practice the language, of course that if you want to write in portuguese it’s fine too)

oh and about VLC playing anything, i thought so, but in some recent mac book pro VLC do not play DVD’s from other regions than the region of the mac, i know that in powerbooks it plays any DVD
i checked that before changed my region drive

thanks to you all

Did you install the ATI drivers on windows? Do you have those strange dots when the mac is booting up?

If the answer is yes to booth questions then your hardware IS fine, but you probably have to re-install the graphics drivers or even the format the mac partition and re-install the OS. You can try the auto-repair of the osx instalation but it will probably not fix.

I’m no expert. You better check on my opinion before you actually reinstall.

Well, if that’s what’s happening then it may be a hardware problem, only seen when there are calls to those acceleration functions. Or, in other words, this end prooving nothing.

Talking on the forums won’t hurt, but what I would probably do is use your Apple warranty. They’ll probably think less about the issue, replace the hardware and check if the problem still happens. If it does, then they might just put that hard drive in other and similar laptop, to check if it is a software problem. It’s easy (but yes, I know that being without the laptop is a pain in the ass).

Thanks for showing Metropolis there… But the question is: do you also think Metropolis is a dystopia?

So this kind of suggests that something has gone awry with the video drivers on your OS X. I think.

If I had to guess, there is some sort of graphics acceleration on the OS X display system, which is not used by VLC nor by Windows XP. If it were a Windows box, I’d re-install the graphics drivers, but since it’s a Mac and mine has never played up on me like that… I’d look into the software updates that may be related to graphics subsystem, any applications that may have fiddled with it - then kill them

the last time I saw something like this was when a DOS box I had in 1994 caught a virus. hmmmm…. naah … :p

Why don’t you show these images at http://forums.macrumors.com/ they have some helpful people there.