My fan got all dusty on my geforce 256 and something went very wrong. It quit turning and i could pretty much fry an egg on the GPU it was so hot. Anyway in both windows and Linux the desktop was sort of deformed if you will. But when I turned on quake3 or starcraft the graphics were fine. I guess the geforce has some magical way of telling when the graphics are going out to a game and it sends it through a different chip because whatever the windows ME desktop goes through was definitely melted. 
oh well, gateway has a 3year parts and labor warranty so i’m getting a replacement for $0. Anyway, check the fan on your video card and make sure its not dusty!!!