First of all, the rig is:
Mobo: GA-990FXA-UD5
CPU: FX-6300 (stock speeds)
GPU: GTX-760 (4gb)
Ram: 8gb... Viper Extreme? Patriot?
Kingston SSD for OS
750 watt PSU (I've already come to know my PSU to be a bit shoddy but I'm almost certain that's not the problem here)
When I first start up my computer (boot or from sleep) this is what my log in screen looks like. You can see the little flower icon I never customized. This will go on for several seconds, then usually fix itself. While it's like that, I go ahead and log in. I think the change of screen is what snaps it out of the glitch because I think I remember this happening when I started a game a week ago and I fixed it by alt tabbing and re-fullscreening the game. So far, it's not been a permanent problem that renders the computer useless, but it's still obviously bad.
As far as why this is happening, I'm unsure. I updated my NVIDIA driver to 350.12 or something the day after the release of said driver and soon after this started happening. I rolled back to 347 (?) thinking it was just a driver bug, but the problem persists. Googling has turned up nothing and NVIDIA hasn't followed up the update so I assume this is an isolated problem and may not involve the driver. The only physical manipulation with the GPU is water cooling for months now. Although I have never had perfect stability, I've never had stuff like this happen before. The most extreme things to ever happen so far have been OpenGL crashes for Starcraft 2 and black-screen-of-death crashes (sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes actual program crashes) for Guild Wars 2. I don't even overclock because Guild Wars 2 and Starcraft 2 are really bitchy about overclocks for some reason (in my experience). As far as these problems go, Googling has led me to believe this does't happen to me any more often than other people. I've even been assured by other GW2 players that the game doesn't handle large OCs on GPUs well, so I stopped and that checked out. This is way beyond my troubleshooting and I'm not new to computers.
Any help figuring out these instability issues is much appreciated.