MacBook Pro Problems at Start Up: Please Help!!

Question

Hellos and Saluations,
Lads and gents: I first want to say what a brilliant board you all have here. Congrats to the admins and mods for a splendid job!
My new friends, I have a MacBook Pro (Intel) that I purchased a little over 1 year ago. I was still running Tiger when, about 6 weeks ago, upon opening the book, I started getting a gray screen that would stay there for a few seconds, then allowing me to start working. Fast forward to 4 weeks ago. The same thing happened, but it got stuck on the gray screen. The next morning it had the same symptoms, but eventually after messing with the mouse pad it came back on. Unfortunately, today it's doing the same thing, and it's stuck on gray.
Being a noob to this forum doesn't make me a board noob in general. I did some searches on this and have tried a number of things from other thread suggestions.
Things I've tried:
A. At start up, holding the Option, Apple, P, R buttons.
B. At start up, holding the Shift button
C. At start up, holding the C button (this produced an audible sound only)
D. There is no Apple icon on the screen, just gray/blue
E. There is no spinning wheel of death
F. I haven't spilled any liquid on it, nor dropped it
A couple of weeks ago, I took the computer to the Apple store. They ran a stress test and tried to replicate the issue, but couldn't. I was advised that they determined the issue to not be hardware/hard drive related; but that the problem was most likely software based. At this time I took the opportunity to upgrade to Leopard. For a little over a week the book was good to go -- no issues at start up. However, not even a week later, when I returned home from work the issue reared it's ugly head again. After a couple attempts at hard shut downs I gave up. The next morning, same thing except that it eventually came back on...
Fast forward to last night.. the MacBook Pro has been on the gray/bluish/greenish screen for close to 24 hours now. I've tried re-booting several times now; pulling the battery then restarting, restarting in safe mode, letting the battery go completely dead then powering up after plugging it in, etc. NOTHING works...
This really fails. The book is only 14 months old and only used for a couple of hours/day. The "genius" at the Apple store advised me that this issue isn't hardware related, but I'm beginning to think that it's a video card issue, which, if I'm not mistaken, is incorporated into the motherboard -- making it a hardware issue. I'm gonna be hells p!ssed if they tell me it's the video card or the screen. Both will be stoopid expensive and, after only 14 months of light use, very very disappointing to their quality.
Anyways, sorry if this is long winded, but I don't know any other way of explaining..
Thanks in advance for any help that people can provide! Again, great forum too!
Darren

Answer 1

So yea. Just returned from the Apple store. They've deduced that the culprit to this issue is my video card. Whilst they were diagnosing the problem, I let the genius know that this is my first Mac product; that I run an international mail order business with 45 windows based pc's; that this book was somewhat of a trial to determine whether or not we would switch to Mac for our network; that we have a deal with Dell on the table to provide us with all new Dell computers; and finally that, given this catastrophic qc failure, we would more than likely be going with Dell (depending on if Apple was going to take care of me on this or not).
Apparently this got through to the genius, as he advised me that, given the book was only 1 month out of warranty, they would be replacing the motherboard pro-bono. This was greatly appreciated by me (and my company) and we will be in talks with Apple to have them provide us with our new network. This whole ordeal, while somewhat insignificant to the overall day-to-day issues of my life, still had me rather concerned about the quality control, and especially customer service of Apple/Mac. I have a new found positive outlook on their service at this time and will report my dealings on all of the international forums that my company is a prominent member/vendor on.
Last,I will continue to update this as it still offers to add to the comprehensive knowledge base of MacBook issues and Apple customer service.
Darren