I have this problem with my ATI Radeon 9800 XT ultra. In various 2D screens I have text fragmenting. There are localized boxes of checkered patterns at interfaces between contrasting colors. I do not see this in games until a recent MMOG I downloaded.
It seems like some sort of anti-aliasing problem. I turned off anti-aliasing but the problem remained.
I went through deleting all ATI related files, ran Driver Cleaner while in safe mode and then installed Catalyst 5.3. No improvement.
I am not sure what to try next. I found your post via searching. It is the first I have found which describes a problem which is so similar to mine.