I'm a little shocked no one asked this, but I'm going to so I'm not curious anymore:

What happened to the machine before this happened? I've personally never seen this before. When I first read this I thought for sure a Graphics card issue but then I remembered they said the boot up screen displayed just fine so it couldn't really be that....I don't think.

Anyway, what was happening before this happened? Was there anything changed? Anything installed?