Things work well in safe mode but not in normal mode. Screen flickers and sys jams. Help! =( thanks=)?

Question

Observations:
1. Screen flickers (as in turns black for 2-4secs then returns messed up) operating with just about anything.(e.g.open windows media player, IE, display cntrl panel)
When that happens, system tends to jam up and I've to switch the comp off and on again.
2. Ctrl Alt Delete, when pressed, has NO TABS, only the CPU Usage, CPU usage history appears, even in SAFE MODE with NETWORKING, which i'm using now to type this, or else normal mode just wouldn't allow it(since it would have jammed up)
3. White mouse cursor has these black lines/patches. Changing type of cursor doesn't help. MOUSE CURSOR is NORMAL when in SAFE MODE.
4. When XP loads,i.e. black screen with the windows logo and the blue thing that moves from L to R,color of windows distorted by black patches
5.Can't even shut down in normal mode,shutting down jams the whole thing up,colors messed up

-As far as I remember, this first occured after I visited a blog.
-Virus scan in SAFE MODE didn't reveal anything

Answer 1

It sounds like you have a video driver problem as well as other problems. Try finding the latest driver and updating.

That will probably only make a few things better, so the more drastic fix is... in safe mode backup all your data files wipe your disk then do a clean install of XP. It is a pain, but your machine sounds really messed up.

As soon as you have the XP reinstalled, immediately do all the XP updates and patches.

Then install an good antivirus and update it.

Only after that should you reinstall your software, then your data.