Computer freezes and or crashes

Using windows vista 32-bit. Last night (the night of March 29th) I heard a loud popping sound coming from my desktop computer tower. Around 6:00pm today, I started getting problems with the screen blanking out, and then coming back on. Upon re-establishing the image, a pop-up towards the bottom right informs me that the atikmdag driver had failed and has recovered. This would repeat every ten minutes or so, until a Blue screen of death appears and restarts the computer, or the computer restarts, or just freezes up. No problems are encountered running in safe mode or running in windows vista basic windows apperance, but attempting to use windows Aero apperance is now the kiss of death, resulting in weird pixilation, the driver problems, and unresolvable computer freezing. Updating my graphics card drivers did not help the problem. Nothing seems amiss with any of my files or hardrive, everything starts up and shuts down fine, etc., and it runs fine in safe mode or vista basic mode, so I can only assume it has something to do with the graphics card. Examining the card showed no obvious damage, and the fan still spins when the computer is on. The card is at least a year old, probably more like two and a hlf or so.