Scrambled display after boot issues?

Question

This afternoon, Netscape crashed on me, and I decided to reboot the computer. It refused to boot-hung on the initial screen, with the grey background and Apple logo with no 'loading' indicator. I gave it about half an hour, since it sometimes hangs there for a minute or so. After two more restarts, got it to boot off the Hardware disk. That didn't find any issues, but it still wouldn't boot off the hard drive; I couldn't find my 10.3 disk OR my Norton disk, so I booted off a 10.2 disk long enough to access Disk Utility. It found a few permission errors, which it fixed, but nothing else. It did boot after that, but the screen is totally scrambled. The cursor appears to be in the top left corner and not moving, but the Invisible Mouse is moving around the screen and usually works-if you can figure out where it is to click on something. The background wallpaper is garbled; if you draw 'mouse boxes' it cleans up, unless you cross an icon, in which case the entire screen rescrambles. Any open window or menu throws distorted (stretched, squashed, almost anything) doppelgangers around the screen. Dropdown menus appear fairly normal by themselves. Windows will have lines of pixels appear and random portions go blank. We have the Dock set to disappear when the mouse isn't over it; when it pops up, the menu bar vanishes. Makes me sick to my stomach after a few minutes! As best I can tell, under all the visual garbage, everything seems to be functioning normally now. It is an unmodified G4 800 mHz with 256 mb of RAM. Any ideas??

Answer 1

Sounds like mine exactly!! I have been trying all weekend for some kind of resolution, and trying is very, very trying I have reset the PRAM (many times), used Apple + S and fsck -y, done disk repair using the disk utility on both Norton Systemworks and Mac OS X. I have also repaired permissions using the latter. All to no avail.
Over the weekend I have reinstalled the original software (using Archive & Install) which has necessitated hours and hours of updating and reinstalling other software (printer, Palm, Expressit, iLife '06, broadband, and Norton sytemworks, ...). Things seemed to be OK until the Norton installation when the problem began again, though to a lesser degree than before.
Meanwhile, I had posted a message on another forum (www.macassist.co.uk) and got the following reply:
"What Mac do you have and what OS is running?
If you have Mac OS X then your problem is Norton Disk Utility it wreaks havoc on Mac OS X and should be trashed."
Good news I thought, and did as suggested, uninstalling Norton Disk Utility. All seemed well at first, but last evening the problem began to reassert itself, and this morning I was unable to boot up without full scrambling. I again reset the PRAM, to no avail, and finally rebooted with Apple + S, and fsck -y. Although the latter reported no repairs, the computer did reboot OK and enable me to enter this discussion.
I have taken photos of the screen in its variouse stages of degeneration in case of need.
What shall we do next??????