Icon and menu "Ghosting" & intermittent startup display problems

Hi all
My Ti is almost 7 years old. 90% of the time it sits on my desk - very rarely moved. Plenty of ventilation and in an air conditioned room.
I have a LG L1780Q digital 17 inch monitor which has been attached for the last two years. My desktop is spread across both screens.
Within the last three months a problem with the display began to present itself - initially it was very intermittent but now the problem is appearing daily.
everything on the desktop like icons and menu bars and dock icons become pasted with a Ghosting approximately twice the width of the icon. The mouse cursor also has a vertical pair of horizontal bars which move around with the cursor.
This problem never effects application windows at all. The bars attached to the cursor remain when hovered over the app - However the application content is not affected at all. So the problem exists only with "desktop" items.
The problem also manifests on both screens. About 50% of the time I can grab an application window with the mouse and drag it all over the desktops and this "wipes clean" the problem - a bit like an eraser. However, in the last couple of days even this doesn't help. 50% of the time a reboot may solve the problem but that too now is getting worse and worse. Also, occasionally on a reboot, instead of the user login window all i get is a series of broken whitish lines against the standard blue background - this is again across both screens. This is obviously the login screen but all scrambled.
Reading the posts here I'm beginning to fear that the dreaded "replace the logic board" phrase may come up
Any suggestions would be gratefully received. Thanks.
I love my TiBook - please don't tell me it's dying

Hi
Many thanks for your advice.
First, of course you are correct - I bought the Ti in Jan 2003. It just seems like it's been with me forever!
In response to your suggestions this is what happened:-
Disconnected external monitor - problem still there.
Booted from original install DVD - problem still there.
I ran disk repair anyway - it found some errors with the catalog file entries, said it fixed them - problem still there as suspected.
Now the wierd thing - after Disk repair i rebooted from HD without the external monitor connected. After sitting watching the spinning grey wheelie thing on the grey start screen for an hour I decided to leave it and go to bed. I don't know what time it actually booted but an hour seems an inordinately long time?
After reboot - problem still there (pretty bad now).
When i reconnected my external monitor, it auto detected the digital feed, screen came on for a second and then went black. Powering the monitor off and on again produced exactly the same result. If I look closely i can just make out very faintly the desktop content on the blacked out external monitor - as though the backlight has failed! Powering off and on does the same thing every time - 1 second of full brightness and content then black!
BOOHOO!!! is my Ti dying?
Unfortunately I don't have the Apple Hardware Test CD.
Should I sit down in anticipation of the verdict?
many thanks

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