2007 Mac Pro will not boot, even in safe mode

Hello,
I have a Mac Pro purchased in 2007 that had been working well up until a few months ago. I had trouble with Microsoft Word 2008 repeatedly crashing; I repaired the hard disk and moved up to Word 2011, and the problem seemed to resolve.
Yesterday, the machine crashed, and I am not able to start it up, even in safe mode. I have tried resetting the SMC and NVRAM/PRAM, removed and cleaned the graphics card (NVIDIA 7300 GT), and removed the 3rd party RAM I installed at least 2 years ago.
When booting to the internal hard drive, the Apple logo will show, then a blue screen followed by a gray screen with a frozen cursor. When I boot to an external hard drive or the OSX Leopard install DVD, the screen flickers like below:
When I tried to boot in safe mode while holding shift + command + V, the safe boot froze after reading:
panic (cpu 2 caller 0x2abf6a): kernal trap at 0x0029a4bc, type 14= page fault, registries:
[4 lines of 2-3 letter acronyms and numbers]
Error code: 0x00000000
I am thinking of buying a new graphics card (ATI Radeon 5700), but I want to be sure (as much as possible) that will solve the problem I am having. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Thank you,
Cheryl

replace the system drive
always clone your system
yes dump the 7300 if you plan to keep using it and use Lion
A clean install would be nice start, on say 120GB SSD or something too
And 2x2GB FBDIMM set is $30 if you need a set
AHT is on your OEM DVD from 20007
dust, temps and air flow is also important

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Please read this whole message before doing anything.
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