Display Problems, artifacts, flickering in Windows

Today when I turned on my computer I noticed it wasn't displaying some things properly in Halo 2. Backgrounds in menus and sometimes it was giving me artifacts. I exited the game and windows started giving me similar problems. There were artifacts around menus and the screen kept going black and I would get a message "Display driver stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

I updated the driver to the newest version but that didn't help anything.

SpeedFan says the GPU is running at 65C but I don't think that's a problem?

I used a converter to try the DVI output on the card... didn't help.

I took out the card and blew it all out... didn't help. Now even the Compaq boot screen looks bad.

When I took the card out I noticed 2 things sticking out of the card had some fibers sticking out of them.
See pic @ http://www.hostmyjpg.com/i/567218de4_0831101709-00.jpg (bad focus, zoom out)
Is that a sign of a problem?

I tried switching to the on board video but that doesn't work at all. Does the AGP card have to be taken out first?

I aslo noticed that boot & Windows display seem to work better (not perfect) when the cards power is unplugged and fine when Windows 7 is in basic mode.

I've got a Compaq Presario SR1575CL running Windows 7 64bit and the video card is an AGP Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT which isn't very old and wasn't really used until recently. Is my video card on its way out or what?