my screen is flashing different colors

My wife's late 2011 13" MacBook Pro (i7) has been doing the same thing, intermittently, since it was only a month or two old. She took it to an Apple store back then. They entered the problem in their records for her laptop, but had no fix at that time since it was happening so randomly, and she didn't want too leave it. (We had video evidence of it via iPhone video.) Since then, the problem was fairly rare until recently, when it has started occurring more often, and occurred at some very inopportune times (on-call Radiology work). As a result, we took video evidence of it again in to the local Apple store today, and left it there. They said they need to reproduce the issue and then diagnose. Reproducing it may be a problem, since it occurs at such random times (usually when on for an hour or so). To clear the problem, I've either had to reboot in Safe Mode, then back into normal boot, or had to boot into her OS 10.6 smaller partition.

I found today an older post on this forum back as far as 2009 with the exact same symptom on an iBook G4 (cycling through 4-5 colors, black, white, and then a grayscale screen, ~2 seconds each), so it's apparently not a brand new problem, but rare enough for many Apple Geniuses to not have seen it before. Since a certain type of reboot can clear it up (see above), without having to let it cool down, I'm suspecting it's software or firmware related rather than a hardware problem. I'll update with what their solution is when she gets it back.

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