Brightside

So I have a Mac Pro (I'm posting in the right forum I promise, just keep reading) with a partitioned hard drive. One side runs Mac OS X and the other ran Windows XP and I've just updated it to Vista today.

I had serious problems with Viruses, Trojans and Spyware blocking up my harddrive until it was basically impossible to run XP, and then seemingly at random, after nearly 3 months of not going near the net, the graphics went a bit nuts. Where on XP everything (start bar, icons on desktop, open windows, photographs etc) should be 3D, it became 2D, and all of the colours that made the objects 3D became grey. So the base colour would remain, but it would be shadowed by this grey colour. I thought at first it was a problem with the graphics card, but when I switched over to the Mac side, the screen was fine, and everything showed up perfectly.

I ended up getting Kaspersky Anti-Virus 09, which cleaned up the XP side enough that I could now use it, but alas, no change on the 3D/2D side. I googled my problem several times but only ever found two answers - A) Put your XP installation CD in and choose repair - I can't do this because I don't have the installation CD, a 'tech' who charged us £600 for a laptop made out of bits that don't even work together said he would take our XP CD from us because we couldn't load it onto another computer so it was of no use.. The other option I was given was to download DirectX 9.0. As I do not have internet on the XP I downloaded the .exe onto my mac and transferred it via USB drive. It didn't want to play. I tried instead finding all the DirectX drivers on my mum's XP laptop and copying them over and it just said that I already had all of the files. I replaced them all but it didn't fix the problem. I tried actually installing the internet connection to find something else, but the XP would not recognise it had a disc in it.

My mum just updated her PC to Vista, and I thought I would try installing it and see if that could repair my problem. I did so and it made it worse - now I can hardly see my screen because it flickers different colours and is grainy. So to try again I made a third partition on the harddrive through XP (so it had the XP base on it) and did a clean install with vista instead of an update, and it had exactly the same effect.

I seriously do not know what to do at this point.. Please help.

Also, please bear in mind that I don't understand acronyms or shortenings or nicknames or initials or ANYTHING computer based, so if you are kind enough to answer.. Please keep it stupid for me. =P

Here is the information from the sticky:

OPERATING SYSTEM:
Previously Windows XP SP2, updated to Windows Vista SP1.

DRIVERS:
I assume this would be DirectX, but if it's not.. Please tell me how to get there.

HARDWARE:
32-bit Mac Pro.



Everything worked fine for over a year before the problems started with a virus. I may have deleted something from the Add/Delete Programs list but I remember being very careful about knowing what each program I deleted was and what it did. I have no record of the ones I did delete.


If you read all that, have a medal.

Brightside.


EDIT: The grainy thing has gone away (by itself.. I didn't do a thing) but the 3D/2D Problem is still there, and when I tried to see the sidebar on the main screen, clicking on the solitare button a 'Critical Error' message came up which said; 'No suitable Graphics Devices found.' I cannot change the screen resolution or anything else. There's only one option and that is 'Lowest. 4bit'