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What system are these games on? It's probably the console (cleaning out the filter usually works) or if it's your computer, that's easily researchable. Speaking of researchable, google your problem. Might just find an easy fix.

Hope you figure it out.

Sorry, forgot to mention, they're all on PC. xD

And it's not easily researchable. The symptoms of my problem are extremely unique, and after considerable Googling, tweaking, and even speaking on the Bioware forums itself, I STILL haven't found a solution for this problem... which is well over a half year old already.

Hmm, that sounds weird. Do you have a screenshot of the problem to give us a better idea? As I don't really know much about it, I'l just ask something more general:

1) Did you apply the lastest patches to the games?(and if they had any effect)

2)Did you try to reinstall your video driver?

3)You were saying it may be the refresh rate. Did you try to override the default setting?(I'm talking about forcing the directx to run on a certain refresh rate)

4)Do this lines only appear in movies or throught the entire game. I'm asking this because I also had some problem like this a while ago with a game or two and I fixed it by changing the game's "binkw32.dll" with a new one.

I dont know that much about networking but if it's something that I've fiddled around with before I might be able to help you. What's the prob?

I never had problems like this. How is Transformers: War for Cybertron? I want to buy it.

What is BAMF?

Maybe try to change some of the graphical options of the game. Like experiment with turning on an off aniti aliasing or chaging from trilinear to bilinear or change resolution.

Should be annoying. Try reinstalling the game keeping the save files or reinstall your graphics card driver. It may work.

@Daktary:

#'s 1 and 2 have already been done for the games. Transformers had no patch as far as I remember. 3, it would appear that I can't change the refresh rates for the game. And as for 4, they do occur throughout the entire game. The problem may originate with binkw32.dll, so I'll check that out and see if it fixed it. The one HUGEST clue about it was the games worked PERFECTLY when I still had Vista, but when I downgraded to XP, the problems started showing up.

@Xiao:

Transformers was pretty good. The multiplayer is pretty explosive, and it's definitely worth checking out. And a BAMF means a "bad-ass mother-f***er".

@Koshai:

Yeah, Mass Effect 2 doesn't give a lot of options to tweak. I've already tried it at the lowest setting though, and it didn't do much.

@Sleven:

Done it three times now, actually, to no effect. :|

I think it is a problem with the refresh rate of the screen not being at the number it should be. But it can be a problem with the games too. I hope you get it fixed. 

Yeah, sorry if I didn't explain it well, I didn't meen to check the games if they had other refresh rates but rather force the whole system to work on that fixed refresh rate. Just go to run(win+r) type "dxdiag"(without the " ) and ok, then go to the More Help tab, and there should be an Override button there. Select an overide value(60,70,72,75,85 depending on what you want and what is your monitor capable at that resolution), ok, then test out your game. Ow and don't forget to revert it to default once you're done messing with it

As far as your clue is concerned, I guess the biggest difference between the two OS'(as far as gaming is concerned) would be the DirectX versions though I doubt that the problem is coming from that. Still you should download the latest version of DirectX 9 if you haven't already done it.

And you should try changing that file, but don't forget to save a copy of the original as it may crash your game if it isn't compatible(i tried this before so don't be surprised if it does, but if it doesn't flicker then you've found the problem)

@Horgen123:

Done and done.

@Daktary:

Looks like I might not need to do that, after all. A combination of a 4th reinstall with the binkw32.dll fix mixed in with it has solved the problem. Of course, now I ran into another problem with one of the sentry turrets being invincible near the beginning of the game, but otherwise, I now have great framerates!

EDIT: Looks like I spoke too soon. The problem's still there, but now it occurs a lot less. Alt-tabbing usually gets rid of it pretty well, I can go for 20 minutes or so before having to alt-tab again. I'm still trying to figure out what's causing it, though.

I think @FetusZero can help you out. I hope you get it fixed.

Did you move to XP 32 or 64bits? I know that XP 64bits is known for being the source of a whole lot of problems. Also providing us with your GPU model and current drivers could be useful, we never know. I do know that Catalyst 10.6 is known for creating a lot of problems within games.

Try to enable V-Sync in the game, as it will lock the frame rate to the refresh rate of your screen. You could, if at all possible, try to also force it through (the refresh rate, that is) whichever software manager you have for your graphic card, either the nVidia Control Panel or Catalyst Control Center. I'd check the options of CCC but I'm currently on Ubuntu and CCC for Linux is quite a bit different than CCC for Windows.

If you're en overclocker, unclock your stuff. Overclocking may cause some issues with some games.

For games like Mass Effect, you can most likely find editable *.cfg files in the game's folder. You can simply open them with a notepad and gain access to a tons of settings that aren't available to you from within the game. I can't promise this is accurate though, as I've never played Mass Effect.

For the TCP/IP settings, I'll need to wait until I log into Windows so I can get a better idea at it, I know that personally, I set my Ip address manually, so I guess it would be in the same area.

Otherwise I think the majority of potential sources have been covered, hope you can get it fixed.

For the TCP/IP, since you are on XP, I don't really know where exactly to change them manually. But I do know that if you need information regarding your IP and stuff, open a command box and type:" ipconfig/all" then enter. It should give you a bunch of information regarding the connection.

@FetusZero:

I'm using Windows XP x32, with a Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS with the most recent Forceware drivers. I don't overclock since I'm paranoid about frying my computer, and unfortunately, Mass Effect does not have a V-sync function. I've checked the .cfg files, and they don't say much except for what's already shown in the Graphics options window ingame.

Well I found this here: http://www.tweakguides.com/ME_7.html

Apparently the settings for Mass Effect are stored in BioEngine.ini, the link I provide you with should give detailed information about the settings. Make sure you take the time to read the important notes regarding the advance tweaking of ME and note that there's 3 pages covering the file, which means it may take a while to go through them.

@FetusZero:

There's a slight problem with that one. Mass Effect 2 doesn't follow the same file template that the first game did. And I'm more intent on rectifying the problems with the second game instead of the first, so... probably SOL, but I did manage to beat the game, though, with a somewhat reasonable framerate.

If it is still needed, I found a tweaking guide for ME2 as well, in the same way as the first game. This link will lead you to the misc. game engine tweaks: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/PC_Tweaks#Game_Engine_.28BioEngine.ini.29