Just curious if other people see the slightly lighter yellow square in the middle, between the two black pieces. I've got a pretty old monitor, so i don't know if it's starting to go weird or if this is just an optical illusion.

looks like the same yellow to me I even looked hard

I only see a mild illusion of it wanting to complete being a shape within, in other words my eyes want to see black lines on top and bottom of the square. It doesn't look lighter to me. When I rotate it 90 degrees it loses its effect immediately.

Looks fine here.
Here's a fun optical illusion.

I'm a bad person =oD

if you see a darker yellow square in the middle it is your monitor. What you're seeing is likely crosstalk and is often noticeable on poorly designed LCD panels. Almost all panels would be darker there, but to a different degree based on the design. To be sure its not just an optical illusion, you could measure it. If you're on a CRT, i am not sure.

m2h: took me a while to get it + had to switch to internet explorer, i laughed...

same color here.
smoke some weed and it won't matter.*L*

the man speaks the truth

As dough says, either crap design IN the monitor - or crosstalk on an analogue vga connection

It's a CRT, and I'm beginning to notice very faint steaks in places that obviously aren't optical illusion. On a white background, black squares often have a hint of light gray line stretching a few pixels to the right from the top and bottom of the squares. They're not even close to an annoyance yet, so I'm not going to be concerned for now, but I'm guessing this is a result of hardware getting old.

Thanks for the responses, guys.

I've seen the streaks you speak of on a few CRTs I've had, usually when they start to get old they do that.

I found the biggest annoyance with aging CRTs was switching from a white screen to a black screen, (example, black desktop, and then full screen explorer window), the image would get slightly bigger when I switched to a white screen. I still have a CRT monitor "just in case" I ever need one, but its been in the basement beside my old p3 desktop.

to rule out the graphics card being bad or faling, try a different monitor ans see if it's still the same.
if it shows o a different monitor then it's the graphics card.
I have a ati AIW that's funky similiar to that but with faint vertical lines.

Seeing as this turned out to be a probable hardware issue, I moved the thread to the appropriate forum.

I did just recently switch from the PCI video back to the integrated ATI video, which I had been intending to do since shortly after switching to the PCI. The mobo/bios apparently has issue with ignoring the integrated graphics when a second card is added. I tried two different cards in this machine, and both of them had trouble with both 2D and 3D acceleration...the Geforce6/256 performance was worse than I used to get with a Geforce2/64. Granted that's comparing PCI with AGP, but still the Geforce6 shouldn't be anywhere near that bad. 2D acceleration is much better now with the integrated video -- 3D acceleration is non-existent with the available drivers, but at least I can play fullscreen video again -- so it will do until I switch systems. It may be the source of this ghosting, though.

The next system waiting to be installed isn't a big improvement in terms of the basic specs (same p4 3ghz processor, 1gb ram as opposed to 512mb), but it's a custom build rather than the assembly line HP I'm using now. Still going to be using the PCI video, though, until I find a decent AGP nvidia card (no PCI-e on the board, and I still have no faith in the ATI Linux drivers). Who knows, though...the PCI card might turn out to be adequate considering I have no interest in cutting-edge gaming. As long as I can do some sculpting and video in Blender and occasionally load UT I'll be happy.

AGP do people still use these I though all boards were at least PCI EXPRESS now

Maybe *now*, but my machines are several years old...i think the newest one was built about 5 or 6 years ago. The one I'm using now does have a PCI-e slot, but my hand-me-down PCI-e card doesn't work well...maybe it isn't getting enough power, or the DVI-to-VGA translation is flakey, or maybe the card is just messed.

I can't justify replacing hardware that still works, and since I don't use Windows or play cutting-edge games I don't have a need for a quad-core machine with 6gb of RAM and the latest graphics processor. Going from p4 / 512mb / PCI video to p4 / 1gb / AGP is considered a decent upgrade for me. I'd rather spend money on expanding storage (and now apparently replacing the monitor) than on a new mobo + cpu + video + ram, which would essentially be the equivalent of buying a new system. If I'm going to do that I'd just as soon get a cheap laptop.