Smeared images & pixelated icons

I've got a 4 year old HP Pavilion a430n with a Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8x video video card.

About 3 weeks ago, many of the icons on my desktop began to look pixelated (only some of them) and at the same time most, but not all, images on web pages and digital camera jpegs are indecipherable.

I tried a known good monitor and had the same issues.

I next tried to replace the video card thinking that was the issue. I wasn't having any success doing it myself so I went to the Geek Squad. They were able to install, but it didn't solve the problem so I went back to my old video card.

Thinking it might be the AGP slot, I next tried to remove the AGP video card and use a PCI video card on an open PCI slot. Everything installed OK, but still had the same image issues.

My assumption at this point is that I have a deeper issue or that another piece of hardware other than the AGP slot or video card is having issues.

If anyone can offer suggestions or confirmation, I would appreciate it as I'm $90 poorer from the Geek Squad and no closer to solving my issue.
sean@clphob.com
I couldn't get the print screen function to work so I took a couple of digital pictures of yahoo.com which shows the issues. Pictures are posted here:
[url=http://picasaweb.google.com/seanpatmcc][/url]