Based on your previous link I actually tried clicking the "Performance" mode option but it was pretty darned agressive and horrendous. lol...
 
It essentially deselects ALL the items in that list and makes everything look like poop on a cracker so I may just ease into that stuff a bit.
 
May or may not help and I'd have to see how it affects Sonar and various other audio related programs.
 
I generally don't care about cosmetics but that was an immediate throwback to Win3.1 graphically... heheh
 
If it helps with audio stuff though I will do it.
 

No thats not what I meant. I have as much eye candy as I can which is everything. With Windows 10 it actually rather nice. I was thinking more about performance vs background. Set it for best performance while keeping graphics on a high level. 
 
With Vista this was a non issue. Its also so in all the MS OSs since. Graphics when put on the the highest level get moved from CPU processing to the GPU directly. (Think of OpenCL) Eliminating high performance in order to save CPU actually does the opposite. The last thing you want is all graphics processing going through the CPU. In XP and older OSs  direct GPU processing was not possible for a normal Windows program. Only games went through DirectX for display. 

I would pull the card and re-seat it. After that I would go back to the factory install disk and re-install the driver it shipped with. It sounds like the issue is graphics card related for sure. If it was Sonar only I'd flush the picture cache, but this seems global from your description.

Honestly the vid card was an afterthought because I was advised it may not be a good idea to use the MOBO's onboard graphics for Sonar. I hunted this one down because it had 1GB of onboard video memory which would offload some resources from the CPU/MOBO and was fanless (heatsink so no noise) but I picked it up for $20 because I was out of cash.
 
Reseating might be good. Considering uninstalling all the annoying NVIDIA crap too. Also I've been wanting to completely wipe this system and start from scratch but that's gonna take a HUGE amount of sorting, cleaning and backing up. I just have not had time and the system has generally been solid.
 
I'm going to be trying out Manchester so hopefully that will knock the Sonar issues out and this will go back to being a simple oddity/annoyance BUT I guess I could/should crack the case and do a visual of the hardware.
 
Cheers.

You can run msconfig and see the NVidea stuff and uncheck it, both in services and startup.
This will have the effect of uninstalling without actually uninstalling,

This is a driver issue. What you're seeing is a video acceleration feature (in which only those portions of the display that have changed are refreshed) that isn't working right. Check your control panel and see if there are 3D Acceleration options you can turn off.

@bitm... I'm just going to uninstall all that crap and go back to my old settings if I keep having problems. Only reason I installed it was because AD2 did not fit into the old style screen res. Now that I think we can scroll in the VST window that's no longer an issue (but I gotta test it and would like to keep the widescreen action). Thanks.
 
@bitf... I will definitely check that out. I don't need any of that fancy crud going on. My only care is about Sonar stability and audio quality. Not even sure if 3D acceleration has any (positive) effect on anything I do on this system. I'm guessing it's for games and video stuff... which I rarely partake in on this system and when I do I don't need any fancy shmanciness going on. Thanks.