Help! 450MP Inverted Colors Display problem

[k s d]

Hi all.
I'm running a Sawtooth G4 450DP, stock ATI rage128 video card,
1024mb ram, OS 10.2.5.

I'm stumped... Last night I was surfing the net w/safari-1.0B2(v73)
and the beachball progression wheel came up. If the wheel lasts long
(which isn't often) I usually force a restart, but I got up did some
other things and let it run it's course. After approx. 10min. the screen
turned black & white - the beachball went pitch black but was still
present. I then hit the force restart button.

Now when I restart, the Blue screen is present during booting and then
just as the desktop appears, fades to B/W. The display control panel
defaults to 256 colors when rebooted, but only displays B/W. When
I switch to Millions, there's a brief flash of blue and everything is then
"Inverted" (blue is yellow, etc.). When I make a screenshot, take it to
Photoshop and select "invert", it corrects it (on my inverted screen 
anyway).
This tells me that somehow the display software is using a negative
color pallet for some reason. I never changed anything, and everything,
until this event, has been fine for months.

The only way I can get the display to display properly is to startup in
Safe Mode and starting up in OS 9.2 works also. So this proves that
it's not my monitor  + it's been fine until the spinning beachball incident.

Here's what I've done:
Reset pram, did a Cuda reset, Repaired permissions, Reinstalled OSX
10.2.5, Downloaded and installed latest drivers from ATI.

Any other suggestions?  is there a preference I can trash?
Could a problem with Aqua suddenly have cropped up (I can't utilize it
with the ATI Rage128 anyhow).
Like I said at the beginning.. I'm stumped.

I don't know the underpinnings of OSX or anything about Unix for that
matter, this is driving me nuts, and I have work with now past-due
deadlines to do! Please help!
TIA
-Kevin

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