OK, here goes my long a$$ question/explanation:
I have a compaq computer which I recently installed an EVGA Nvidia 8600GTS in. Great, right? Everything was working perfectly fine, never gave me a problem.
Then the other week, the screen started going black and only displaying (sort of flickering) certain portions of the screen where I had the mouse pointed at. This only happened after I had been playing Richard Burns Rally, and then left the launch menu open while doing other stuff on the computer.
Finally, today Java said it had an update to install. I did this, and it crashed while restarting (it wouldn't shutdown). So I turned the power off, waited a minute, then fired it back up. This is where the suck starts; either the GPU or the processor (I cannot tell) "clicks" 5 times in a row. The computer then fires up and oes its thing, BUT there is no display. If I hook up my onboard graphics, they are turned on (without having restarted it again or anything). THis must be some sort of fail safe mode I would guess, as I had the bios changed to run the graphics from the pcie slot (didn't want legacy driver interfering). So I checked things out, uninstalled the java update, removed my drivers, took the card out, checked if there was anything wrong, put it back in, and it still does the "5 click" thing with no display.
In between the yanking of the card and putting it back in, I fired the comp up with the onboard graphics selected in the BIOS. Perfect, no problems (except for not having any drivers installed). Thats when I turned off the computer, put the card back in, and tried to get things working again.
And now I am here, a very, very sad beyonder Please help? It'd be greatly appreciated!