Macbook Pro 17" 2009 display glitches regardless of GPU. Help?

The display has started having a lot of color distortion and artifacts. Here is a picture to illustrate some of them:

I tried switching between the 9400M and the 9600GT GPU but it has no effect on this. I also tried turning it off and rebooting.

I tried booting in Windows 7 and the problem is there.

At the OS selection screen, the problem is also apparent.

This happens even after if the computer was turned off for the night and cool to the touch.

It showed all of a sudden last night and it does not disappear.

This is a 17" Macbook Pro 2.8Ghz C2D 9400m/9600gt last generation. Purchased in October 2009. It's 19 months old.

I don't have a minidisplay port adapter so I can't test it on an external screen yet.

Any ideas on how to diagnose this further? Has anyone ever heard of such a problem even? You'd think even if one GPU fried, the other would carry on. Do they share VRAM? Could the VRAM be bad?

Thank you for your time.