My wife bought a Dell Inspiron laptop a while ago. From time to time, for no apparent reason, the screen goes black with nothing but a small box in the center of the screen with lines in it. She has to reboot the machine. She contacted Dell and they loaded a different display driver for her, but then the computer wouldn't recognize her printer so she restored back to where it was before, without ever really being able to see if the updated driver worked. Personally, I think it's a hardware issue with her display adapter, but Dell apparently thinks it's software related. Anyone ever heard of this before or have troubleshooting suggestions?

Sounds like a driver issue, you should try to get the driver from the video card vendor rather than dell, if you can't find it, post your hardware id for the card and ill find it. Open the device manager, then open the properties of the video card, click the details tab, change the dropdown list to hardware IDs, and post the part that says VEN_XXXX&DEV_XXXX.