I've had the exact same thing Alli's having happen on my brothers desktop machine which took a few beers and alot of time to finally get back to normal.
It was a driver problem, possibly with how DirectX and the Nvidia drivers were installed but i'll never know. Only solution was to uninstall the NForce drivers and revert back to the original DirectX that shipped with that version of XP and install DX9c then the latest NForce drivers on top of that.
Perhaps you could try the same thing with the laptop, its probably a DX problem if it happens with two different GFX Card manufacturers.
