Pretty Dashes and Hang With External display

Greetings,
About 1 out of 5 times when I plug in an external DVI display, a few seconds after the display wakes up I get a very pretty pattern of dashes and colors on the display and a hung computer. I've kind of lived with it, but this morning the reboot ended up requiring me to reset parameters and other painful things. I searched the forums but didn't see anything similar reported.
Macbook Pro 15, Dell 24" monitor
Any thoughts?

It's not clear how you are attaching the monitor. The preferred method is to attach the external with the computer turned off. That lets the computer discover the monitor and load any needed support files when it next boots.
You might also want an Apple Store or AASP to check for a known video chipset board defect described in this Repair Extension Program (REP):
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2377
This applies only to MacBook Pros with model identifiers of "MacBookPro3,1" and MacBookPro4,1." Open System Profiler (in Applications > Utilities) to find your identifier code. Code ending with 1,1; 1,2; 2.1; and 2,2 are older and not included in the REP coverage.
If the code is 5,1 or higher, then you MBP is a newer model and you are better off posting in the forum for later MBPS here:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=251

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