Very strange display problem just started

Hi ... I'm wondering if anyone can help with a strange problem I've just started to experience.
I'm running Win XP via Bootcamp. All had previously worked absolutely fine -- until today. Whenever I boot into Windows, I get past the welcome screen, my desktop appears for about 1-2 seconds, then -- boom -- goes black.
Totally black screen -- no cursor or anything.
Windows is still running, I can tell -- and if I press keys, I know they are working still (eg. can still shut down/restart through key combos). But the display is totally gone.
I'd used Boot Camp without problems yesterday -- but the last thing I did was shut down and install updates. So presumably something in the latest windows update has clobbered the display in some way. But I have no idea what, or how to solve the problem.
Further info:
If I F8 boot into VGA mode, exactly the same thing happens.
I've also F8 booted into safe mode and disabled the graphics card driver (ATI card) then rebooted into normal and still the same problem occurs.
I'd be hugely, hugely grateful for help, as I'm at my wits' end here ... Thanks

Ah, so you have a first-gen model from the looks of it. If I might make a suggestion, please update your tagline as follows to assist others in helping you:
MBP (Early 2006)
You can expand upon this as you like.
Perhaps I wasn't reading the original post, but what version of Windows were you running at the time?
As I recall, that model line of MacBook Pros needed an EFI firmware update to operate Boot Camp. Before the mid-2006 speed bump, these models also needed an SMC firmware patch. With the EFI update, your "Boot ROM revision" should be MBP11.0055.B08
If you can boot to Safe Mode, try using the Add/Remove Programs or Programs and Features applet in your Control Panel to uninstall the ATI driver properly. Should that fail, search out "ATI Catalyst Uninstaller" using your favorite Web crawler. The first thing to come up should be AMD's uninstall tool, which you can then run to get rid of the driver.
Once you've done this, reinstall the ATI software from your Leopard/Boot Camp DVD and re-run the Boot Camp 2.1 patch from the Web; this should properly update the ATI software and get you back on track.
We would also need to rule out whether a recent update caused this issue, in which case rolling back to a prior restore point may help. You may lose documents created between the restore point time and the present, but this is normal.
The only other possibility I can suggest is to rebuild your entire Boot Camp setup and take notes as you get back up to the point where the blackout occurred. This way, you'll have some documentation handy whether you repost here or contact Apple directly.
Good luck,
Nate
Message was edited by: Nathan Alden

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As far as I can tell, the URLs that I type in to my browser are, sparodially, not translated correctly into the webpages that they are supposed to represent. This problem is probably effective 75% of the time, and the rest of the time my internet works roughly correctly. For instance, when I enter http://www.google.com, instead of being taken to the Google homepage, I am taking to the homepage of Jammin Beats DJ Service, an obscure website about a company in northern Pennsylvania. The actual URL of this website is http://www.jamminbeats.com, but when my internet is malfunctioning, 'jamminbeats' is for all intensive purposes replaced by 'google' (that is, it applies not only to the main page, but to sub pages, so "http://www.google.com/weddings" takes you to "http://www.jamminbeats.com/weddings" and etc). For most other webpages, one of two things happens. Either I am taken to the correct page but it is displayed without any images or frames (just the html text and links), or I am taken to a blank page with the header "Under Construction", which I assume is the default for a page that doesn't exist. This is why it seems as though the URLs are simply being interpretted erroneously.
This problem occurs when connecting both to the wireless and the wired internet at my hotel, and it occurs on both Safari and Firefox, so it is not a connection-specific or browser-specific problem. It may be a problem with the hotel's internet, and as of yet I have not had a chance to test the computer at another location. However, a colleague using an IBM computer has had no problems, and I am currently on a Samsung machine in the business center of the hotel and it is working correctly as well. I have searched extensively online for a similar problem but have come up empty handed, and more than anything, I am confused about what might be causing this problem. The strangest thing is that a fraction of the time, the internet functions normally, but it is usually roughly 15 minutes out of every hour, and eventually I am inevitably taken back to Jammin Beats.
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I did consider that, as I was in Beijing last week and there are a number of censored sites. However, in Korea I have had problems with very basic sites like facebook, wall street journal, google, yahoo, Korean google, my hotel's webpage, etc. Further, I have successfully gotten all of these sites to load seemingly at random, and can access them without problems on other computers. The only disconnect seems to be between my MBP and the internet, not between Korean internet and the web. I have toyed around with the network settings, and although sometimes after switching from "Automatic" to a fixed connection I get some sites to work, it usually only lasts a short time and eventually the same sites stop working. I reset my cache regularly to make sure I'm not getting sent to cached sites, but this also doesn't help. Further, my Apple Mail, Skype and AIM accounts jump between being connected and disconnected randomly as well. Again, this is isolated to my own computer, which is why I'm so confused.

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Hey there,
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Hi, Michael.
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Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

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string wrote:
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never had problems with my iPad, but since a few weeks i have à strange problem with my screen.
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A workaround is to turn the brightness down, it may reduce the 'burn in' less & makes it less noticeable.
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Very strange display problem just started

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