Inspiron 5150 Video Problem (DirectX?)

Dell Inspiron 5150 BIOS

A38 Intel Pentium 4, 3.06GHz

512 MB of RAM ATI Mobility Radeon 9000, Driver ver 6.14.10.6371

DirectX ver 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

 

I bought this laptop about 2 years ago, and it always worked fine. One fateful day, my fiance purchased the Sims 2 and we installed it. Everything was fine for upwards of a year. However, one day, it stopped working.  When you try to run the Sims, this is what you see:

Once you exit the Sims, you see this:

 

I tried to fix it for a long time- I'm pretty computer literate, so I've done all the obvious things: I installed all the latest drivers & patches, and did all the windows updates. Nothing. I was so desperate for a solution that I actually formatted the hard drive so I could start over with a clean slate- Nothing. The problem kept coming back. After all my effort I finally gave up and figured it was a problem with the game. So, flash forward to now. I tried to play Star Wars: Empire at War, and it has the exact same problem. This changes everything, because now I know it's a problem with the computer, not just one program. I discovered if you run the DirectX self-test, you see the same type of effect. So, I've spent the better part of this weekend trying to make it all work. I did all the standard fixes again, but still no effect. After web-chatting with Dell (you can't really get a human on the phone anymore; for that matter the chat may have been a clever computer program) for 2+ hours, we came back to the old "Re-install windows." But this time there's a twist: I should flash the BIOS first! Since I had version A03, and the newest version is A38, I'll assume that they've made some updates. So I bid goodbye to the chat tech and began the BIOS upgrade. Of course that in itself didn't fix the problem, so today I reformatted the computer (again). So, 7+ hours of work, and what do you know? The problem shows up immediately! 

 

So, I went back to something the tech said, and I've seen mentioned elsewhere on the web: reseat the video card.  I was terrified of trying to do this myself, but Dell actually has very good instructions on how to do this on the web.  Plus, a hardware solution was the only thing I could think of that would still affect the computer after I reinstalled windows.  So I took a deep breath and went for it.

 

I took stuff apart, blew out lots of dust, reseated the video card, and put it all back together good as new.  I ran the DirectX test, and joy of joys, it worked!  Then it worked again!  On the third try, the problem came right back. 

 

I'm all out of ideas.  I would love to hear any new ones you guys may have.  If you're interested in a transcript of my Dell tech support chat, it's at the bottom of this post.  I would really like to get this fixed!

 

Thank you!