Intel imac display glitch and involuntary restart

Just want to know if anyone else has experienced this specific problem, there are plenty of complaints about intel imac displays but I can't be bothered to sift through them all trying to find a match for my problem.
A couple of months ago I was watching a video in quicktime and noticed that my screen was glitching and flashing fragmented diagonal lines - like a commodore 64 loading type thing. Then the spinning-ball came up and a force quit didn't do anything so I had to force shut down. I started up and it occured again. Then the screen went blank/black, but still lit up, and restarted without me doing anything. It also got stuck during start up the second time this occured. I panicked and ran out to buy a 500GB external drive, backed up all of my work and then re-installed mac osx from disk, archive and install job. This seemed to sort it and for the following two months it seemed OK. No sign of any problems.
Since then I have updated from 10.4.7 to 10.4.10 (which I have suspicion that it screwed the firmware in my motu 828 firewire audio interface, costing me a £130 repair - but that's another painful story).
It happened again tonight (the screen thing, not the motu). And the ball came up and I couldn't do anything. Force shut down, restart - screen glitching again. Then I had 2 unexpected restarts, one getting stuck in startup. Then a successful startup but accompanied by the glitchy graphics, mainly red/pink pixellated diagonal lines flickering in and out. I ran a disk first aid - no problems. Did a disk permission repair. Shut down and ran a hardware test, the first few minutes of the test the screen was still at it but then stopped glitching, hardware test found no errors (it was an extended test too). Now I'm back on it and it's all OK.
Any suggestions/similar stories?
When it occured 2 months ago I had the original ram that came with the imac. Now I have 2x1GB sticks of crucial ram.

That's it! Well, that's what I have. Unfortunately, I don't know about the cause, but I don't ever recall having it prior to an update going back about a year ago. I recall an update, and that update being immediately followed by some sort of Apple Graphics something-or-other. I feel pretty certain that's when I first noticed this. I just had my LCD replaced for another reason, but I think you'll agree, it's not an LCD issue. In my case, browser activity, scrolling up or down in a page, seems to be the most common trigger. I've also seen "pieces" of the torn page, on the screen when minimizing the browser to the dock (usually Firefox, but I think I've seen it with Opera and Safari too). Is there a way to find update packages installed somewhere? I'd know it if I saw it, and I'd definitely try removing that suspect package/update.
Message was edited by: geekboy2000 - corrected OS

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