i think it's the graphics card, unfortuantely Maya has issues with the 8800 series.
How to fix it I don't know sorry.

update heres a fix that someone else posted on the net regarding issues with this card...

1. Fire up the control panel and go to 3D configuration values.
2. In the Configuration values for application press the Add button and choose maya.exe from the Bin folder in your Maya installation folder.
3. Deactivate all anisotropic and antialiasing filtering and set all modes to the highest performance setting.
4. In "Conformant texture fixation" (sorry for the translation) select "Use OpenGL applications"
5. Activate "Report errors"
6. And force activation on "Vertical synchronization"

This did the trick for me. I'm no expert and probably some of the settings are would not interfere anyway but it's been quite an annoying problem and I'm not willing to experiment any further.