Okay, this is a quick summary of things right now, detail is in spoiler tags below (originally posted elsewhere )

Connecting the graphics card to the monitor over DVI gives the 'signal out of range' error.

Connecting it over VGA works, but shows visible distortion in the BIOS (white dots/lines over the screen).

Installing the official driver will cause windows to crash on bootup, blaming the display driver.

Letting windows install its driver will do the same; the only one that works is the generic VGA one you automatically boot to.

Booting up the system in PCLinuxOS (over VGA, I happened to have a liveCD lieing around) shows a huge amount of distortion on the screen. Once it gets to the 'select keyboard type' screen, the monitor is covered by random distorted clutter, and I can only see anything at all by moving the mouse over part of the image (like when an application lags out, highlighting something makes it, but nothing else, show up).

I think my graphics card is dieing - can anyone suggest anything to the contrary? :(

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
Hmm, well that was odd. I'm writing from an old computer that we happened to have lieing around, because my main computer has decided that, after a graphics driver crash in tf2 (screen went black, had to hard reset - it's happened before, with recovery possible), not to display anything :P

Even during the BIOS boot, the monitor displays 'Out of Range, H-frequency 65 KHz, V-frequency 56 Hz.

It posts correctly, and from what I can hear, almost appears to be booting correctly too.

The problem is, I can't see anything :(

I'm going to try it on this monitor now (will need to shut this down to do so, hence no results yet), and if that fails, I suppose resetting the CMOS won't hurt.

Else I'm forced to go for professional help :(

Any blinding flashes of insight, anyone? :)

--- (merged)

Well, that was even more odd.

The computer booted fine using this old CRT monitor, and I elected to go into safe mode.

I uninstalled the graphics driver, rebooted, and replaced it with the newest version that I happened to have sitting in my downloads folder.

However, now booting while not in safe mode (ie, off the nvidia driver) gives a BSOD naming nvlddmkm.sys (the nvidia vista display driver) as the culprit :(

Oh, and oddly enough, there are a collection of white dots displaying during BIOS boot, scattered over the black background in groups of three vertical 'lines'.

:(

I guess my (only? :P) next step is to see if the other monitor will accept the signal from this, working, computer.

The crash-on-boot with the nvidia drivers has me puzzled, though :S