Horizontal Lines appear in random spots on display

Hey everyone.
Recently, my white iMac has been locking up a lot lately (forcing me to hard-reset, boo) and horizontal lines have been appearing. It freezes most often during more graphically-intense applications like games and Pro Tools. It's not the regular Mac freeze, where the grey dialogue box politely and multi-ligual-ly informs you that you need to reset. When my computer freezes, things just lock up, or the screen will go black.
I thought since I had not done a whole lot of computer maintenance since I bought it, there was a possibility it was just a horrible software glitch.
So I zero'd my hard drive and reformatted. Almost immediately the lines returned. Interestingly enough, I don't need a digital camera because these awful lines can get captured by screenshots.
The lines are typically pinkish or black, but if you look close, the individual pixels in the lines seem to be coloured arbitrarily. If the lines appear on a window, I can drag it around and the lines will follow. If I resize the window, the lines disappear.
Here's a screenshot. Note how the lines only affect the one window, and do not span the entire screen.
http://img161.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=29918lines_122708lo.jpg
These lines aren't bound to a particular window, just the desktop as a whole.
http://img142.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=45631lines2_1221119lo.jpg
How are these things getting captured on screenshot if I just reformatted my computer?
If it's not a software error, could a worn-out graphics card produce odd artifacts that are screen-capture-able? Apple ships hardware that can't last 2 years? Am I going to get shafted if I try to call them? Is there possibly a fix for this?
Thank you everyone for taking the time to read my post, and thanks in advance if you have some advice or want to express that you share the same issues.

Just to add a few comments to this thread, I had similar problems (green dots appearing at random locations on the display, lines, then corrupted icons graphics / text, and eventually computer lock-ups that required a power/hard reset).
It took me weeks to realize that heat was the root cause of these display artifacts / computer lock-ups. I had run zillions of memory tests, ran the Apple Diagnostic so many times, tried TechTool Pro, and I never ever got reported with a single error by any of these tools. I swapped RAM, disconnected all external Firewire / USB devices, tried different versions of Tiger / Leopard, to eventually conclude it had to be something else...
... and then it struck me one evening this week. I realized that I was now using my Mac Mini to transcode video (a task that I used to perform with my iMac, but that I stopped to use as a transcoding device as this would eventually lead to the symptoms described above), and that the Mac Mini's fan would increase in speed when the CPU would get loaded. It is then that I realized that I had never heard my iMac's fan change in pitch... with the exception of when I was running the Apple Diagnostic tool !!!
Gotcha !
I also downloaded the latest version of smcFanControl, and changing the fan settings to 1200 (ODD), 2200 (HDD), 2000 (CPU) fixed all the symptoms.
I submitted a bug report to Apple about this, as I consider this is a major issue. I have seen the temperature of the power supply reach 80+ Celsius. Water boils at 100 Celsius. That is hot, way too hot.
I hope Apple will fix this issue ASAP through a SMC firmware update as fans control is meant to be automated.
Just my 0.02$CAD.

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