Annoying flashing randomly all over screen

[Corn Shucker]

(http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a112/romanemp/problem2.jpg)

Ok, so I've had my game for about 4 days (this being the 4th) and it ran absolutely great... untill now. I opened up the game today and after playing for about 2 minutes, the screen started sporadically flashing all over. The screenshot above just displays one little part of it--really hard to screenshot it because it happens so fast. The spots only show up for about 1 second, and then disappear (but it happens in about 10 differant places at one and keeps randomly coming up). Looks like its like it's smudging the graphics when froze in a screenshot, but its super annoying and appears to be flashes when playing.

It only happens when in the normal traditional view (like in the screenshot). Not when in the world view. It still happens when talking to leaders and in the city-screen view also though.

I don't think its an artifact. I run my computer 24/7 (only time it goes off is when the power goes out ). Heres my system specs:

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
Pentium 4 CPU 3.40GHz
3.42GHz, 2.00GB of RAM
Windows XP Professional

And I updated my drivers to the latest (81.85 -had to cause the game wouldnt start )

I would really appreciate any help-its really annoying and I'm not gonna play the game till i get it fixed!

 

[Corn Shucker]

Well Turns out it happens in other games too-not just civ.

I decided to give my computer a rest-and after abou 15 minutes, started it up and opened civ. It appears to be fixed-played for about 5 minutes with no issues (it came up immidiately before after the initial problem occured) I think it might be ok now, but if you happen to know that its not fixed or what it was-let me know.