Last summer Kosada purchased a MacBook Pro for the president of Yon Reptile Campaign. It’s been a great improvement over the old Dell laptop he was formerly using, and, though he was initially worried about whether he’d be able to grasp the new UI, he seems to have picked it up quickly, and he reports that he’s been loving it.

But this morning he called me with a rather odd problem:

“I hooked up my Treo and started syncing it, then walked away for a few minutes. When I returned, the screen was covered with a bunch of squares, and I can’t do anything.”

He took a few photos with his cellphone camera and emailed them to me (click for full-size):

(You can see bits of the menu-bar scattered around the screen, and it looks like Missing Sync had launched iPhoto. Possibly related?)

I talked him through a few tests. He was able to see the mouse cursor and move the mouse, but clicking didn’t cause any apparent response. He could activate Dashboard — Dashboard itself looked fine, and the checkerboard showed through in the background. He then tapped the power button, and the “Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?” dialog appeared, but it was scrambled and the buttons didn’t work.

I instructed him to power it off by holding the power button down. Since rebooting, it’s been working fine.

Confused.

I googled it a bit but wasn’t able to find any clear reports of this happening to other people.