Artifacts (mostly) on second monitor for Radeon HD 5450

[pcGnome]

Sometimes on my primary monitor as well.
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Getting older, I'm relying on magnifier using the top 3/4 of the second monitor.
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The bottom 1/4 I use for things to temporarily keep track of, like when extracting files with winrar, I drag that little window from the center of my primary monitor to the bottom quarter of the secondary monitor while I go do other things undisturbed on the primary monitor.
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But dragging the little winrar window leaves white artifacts ALWAYS on the second monitor as I move it horizontally into place.
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Sometimes (about 1% of the time), I'll close a program window on either monitor and it stays there. I think it didn't close and get no response by continuing to try and close it and then check by dragging another window across it and it's wiped away.
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The artifacts can be cleaned up by maximizing anything on that monitor and then un-maximizing it, but that's a pain. I thought this kind of artifact problem with motion went the way of the dodo on CGA video cards long ago.
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Anybody know why this happens?
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pcG

[Baldrick]

Tried update your radeon hd drivers ?

No overheating/fan problems? But it usually doesn't cause such problems that disappear when you maximise windows.

[pcGnome]

Wow, if I wait too long, token expires and heeding the "reload page" makes my entire message disappear.
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NOT COOL!
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But I've learned not to trust, so I saved a copy before I let this system destroy my message and here it is:
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Rule #1, updates now 99% likely to just keep idiots employed. i.e.:
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Spent three hours trying to update from 13.251.0.0 to 14.12 by running:
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amd-catalyst-omega-14.12-with-dotnet45-win7-64bit.exe
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Finished without error, but did not update driver.
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Just slowed my machine to a crawl by installing some idiot program called raptr.
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But upgrading was never going to be the solution. HD 5450 has been around for a long time, if they hadn't fixed it by 20131206, then they never will.
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In any case, your question about the possibility of a hardware (overheating) problem is not it. The problem is that it draws things while I'm moving them, then fails to erase afterward.
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I'm including a picture to show what it looks like. The white lines and blocks to the left aren't really there covering them up with any part of any window will make them disappear. Well, I thought I was - a window pops up and the top half has two choices to browse and I browse to the file and it shows in the top half. I click "upload" and the file appears as an attachment (after uploading message completes) bottom half of window, but the top half reverts to "no files" the bottom half says 22.3kb and has a 'remove' button, but I see nothing after I close the window to show any attachment. I must be missing something fundamental or it worked and just doesn't show here. We'll see.
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Edit after post: the attachment does indeed show up, would have been nice to know before posting the message ... oh, well ...
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Have decided I'd much rather deal with artifacts than AMD, so thanks for all good intentions.
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pcG

[Brad]

I can't offer any explanation, but I experienced a similar issue with integrated Intel graphics.

[Krispy Kritter]

As noted above, video drivers would also be my first suggestion. It could be a hardware issue (ie: video card RAM), an actual driver issue, or how Windows interacts with the video drivers (ie: video overlay).

[usually_quiet]

I would check CPU usage and memory usage to see if either is unusually high.

[pcGnome]

Well, because of microsoft being horrible in a whole new way ... mea culpa ... installing AMD driver 14.501.1003.0 correctly (unchecking the gaming thing) and with no previous driver, I guess it had to install the new one ...
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And no more artifacts!
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Oh, beware of the 'horrible' thing hinted at above! I was upset that quickpar would not be reasonable about column widths all of a sudden and I figured, use a restore point to before it became a problem and found out there's a new horror in town.
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After reboot, the window start screen and then a mouse pointer on an all black screen and vast searching only turn up that tapping the shift key five times brings up the sticky keys dialog, which is the only thing my computer would do. No repair or safe mode yielded anything but a black screen with a mouse pointer to move around. Not even safe mode with command prompt was different. Still got it, but it doesn't work.
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Luckily, I had a spare SSD drive for another computer I'd been procrastinating about and now the worst thing is a double boot problem, but that's thirty seconds I can live with. I install stuff, reboot, it does the initial 'start' screen, then spontaneously reboots, but then the second time it works just fine. Three times now with no exception.
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Here's what surprised me, having to reinstall everything, my new win7ult64 can access the old win7ult64 folders (windows / users / program files) on the old SSD drive.
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I did have the foresight to 'export' my entire registry (250MB), but everything came out with an extra space between all the letters, so I don't know how easy it's going to be recovering all my nifty registry tricks (like how to get an nzb file to open in the current instance of Forte Agent). Past experience showed (at least across my LAN) that Win7 is loathe to enter another system's system folders (I always keep a copy of these when I install a new system, because you can never tell when an old driver or obsolete program can come in handy). I actually recommend keeping a working copy of XP going for just that access purpose.
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Anyway, as I said, mea culpa, updating the driver THE HARD WAY and all my artifact problems are in the past.
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Thanks all,
pcG