Radeon 9600 Pro problems

[Russ McGinley]

Ok, I ordered an MSI Radeon 9600 Pro VC from Newegg and got it today. I removed my current video drivers (Radeon 7500), threw this thing in, and booted up.

Immediately, the BIOS and Windows XP splash screens were covered in vertical dotted lines. When I got into Windows, it auto-installed the drivers (labeled as "Radeon 9600 Pro Family" in Device Manager). However, changing the resolution from 800x600 to anything else has no effect with these standard drivers, so I go load the ATI drivers. After this and rebooting, I still get the vertical dotted lines during boot and in Windows, most of my desktop icons are covered by white boxes that look like large pixels and the title bar of all windows is covered in red pixels.

On advice of a friend, I downloaded Catalyst and that solved the problem, however scrolling in Firefox was very choppy as was video, and when I rebooted, it reverted back to its screwed up state. I put back my old VC and it works fine. Anybody run into problems like this with Radeons or is it more likely that I've just got a bad card? Also, I'm running dual monitors but I get these problems on either one, VGA and DVI, and I updated the drivers off ATI's website to the most latest with no fix.