Weird graphical glitch on my laptop

I lost my main rig to technicians for the day, so I tried running City of Heroes on my beefy but old-ish laptop like I used to be able to and ran into a very serious problem: screen tearing and flicker.

Now, the laptop I'm using has an in-built GeForce Go 7900 GS video card, which was pretty heafty for a late 2006, early 2007 laptop, but the game seems to think I have old drivers for it. I don't. I checked the nVidia site and the latest drivers for my card are the drivers I'm currently using, from some time in 2009. Apparently, they disowned this thing, but whatever. I have the latest drivers, but the game still flickers.

Let me explain.

When I play City of Heroes, it looks like an old TV when you'd get bad signal - my screen tears in horizontal strips, and it shows... I can't tell what it is. Either black bars, or normal frames but squashed diagonally. It's not a monitor sync issue, as I tried running with and without vertical sync, but to no avail. I tried running at native resolution, a hardware-chugging 1920x1200 (on a 17'' LCD, no less), and the game kind of stutters at 30-ish FPS, but it runs fine, other than that screen tearing. And said tearing only occurs on interface items - menus, windows, the map, my powers - but not on the 3D portion of the game, at least not on native resolution.

I'd post a pic of this, but it doesn't show up on screenshots. Whatever is causing this, it's happening after a scene is being rendered.

I know I've played CoH on this laptop before, but I've since swapped out its RAM chips and stuck in a new hard drive as it was getting old, meaning I had to reinstall my operating system to a Windows 7 x64. I've not played CoH on the laptop since the reinstall, but other games run just fine. I've seen Left 4 Dead 2 played on it, I've seen World of Warcraft, I've seen a bit of Aion, some Alien Swarm. I mean, it's an old machine, so it chugs, but I've never seen it give me this kind of graphical corruption in any other game.

Would anyone have any idea what this might be?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.