Major graphics issue

[RadicalOne]

I recently went back to playing SimCity 4 (Deluxe) after a few months' break; when I started, I was greeted by a deeply unwanted sight - the return of a problem I had never been able to solve and had only escaped from via a complete system reinstall.

Anyways, the problem is that when I load SimCity, everything will appear fine, but as soon as I move, the screen starts to smear and blur, becoming progressively fuzzier, darker, and more discolored. Areas coming onto the screen are unaffected until they actually are on screen, then they too fall to the blurring.
Refreshing the screen - rotating and so on - fixes the image, but then it blurs as soon as I move again.
Switching to software rendering solves this issue, but at the price of major quality cuts - not a sacrifice I want to make.
The UI is not affected by the issue; only the game world.

The last time I had this issue was a couple of years ago; I had never solved it properly, and only when I later reinstalled Windows (formatting my hard drive in the process) did the issue disappear. I was able to run SimCity smoothly until a few months ago when I started a break, but now when I return, the problem is back.

It is not a hardware issue; nothing has changed since the time I was able to run problem-free. And no, reinstalling SC4 does not solve the problem.
Almost certainly, it is due to something I have installed since then, and had installed that "last time", but what? I have too much to check everything, not to mention the damage I would do in the process.

Below are images of my current installed programs - a long list, you can see - a list of running processes at the time of running the game, and an image of the actual problem.
Things grayed/faded out in the install list were either not installed the "last time" I had the problem, or were installed when I had no issues. They are therefore almost certainly not to blame. That said, please read them anyways, just in case.
Red text on the process list is program ID - I know where most come from. Again, faded ones are not likely culprits.

[fafalone]

It might be a problem with the graphics drivers. Go to the website of whoever makes your video card (or IGP, e.g. Intel GMA) and make sure you have the latest driver version for your OS.

And of course try killing non-essential programs.

btw, WO.exe is probably malware.

[RadicalOne]

The drivers being out of date is not the issue - it worked four or so months ago with the same driver, but not a year ago with a same or similar driver.

And thank you for the heads-up on WO.exe. "Web Offer" has been classified as mild-to-moderate adware and/spyware. I crippled it by removing half of its binary code (open in a text editor, select, delete. )

[fafalone]

Other software and current settings can cause conflicts that can create problems with the graphics drivers, that are often addressed in newer versions. If there's some particular reason you don't want a newer driver you can try reinstalling the same version; but it sounds like some program did something to your graphics subsystem and a driver update is the easiest way to get it back to normal. Nobody is likely to be so familiar with all of your programs and settings that they can isolate a more specific cause.

[RadicalOne]

Ah, something major happened when I tried to install the driver again.
In the middle of it, every process (or nearly every process) on my system failed. I was flooded with "Has encountered an error an needs to close." First was my firewall, then half a dozen other things, then explorer.exe, then 20 more things, then finally everything that is not required to remain logged on.
Even unrelated things like Firefox crashed...

The install worked, but now I am afraid to do the restart required....