Not to be a doom-sayer or anything, but about 6 months ago I had a similar issue with my wife's computer...turned out it was the video card (nVidia 440 MX, yeah, I know older that dirt) itself that was bad as within a week of seeing the artifacting and graphic glitches, I got a BSOD, rebooted the comp, and no screen ever came back up. I swapped the card out for a nVidia 5200 a friend gave me and things booted up normally and EQ runs as it should with the new card. The fact you added in a line that removed hardware SnL doesn't bode well for your card being good...
But from a more troubleshooting stand-point:
Does the card crash or have any graphics/rendoring errors in any other program/game since you started noticing it in EQ?
What exact system specs do you have? power supply, motherboard, ram (and ammount), CPU, video card (AGP or PCI-Express), hard drives/optical drives (and ammount), additional add-in cards, CPU cooler, any additional cooling, mouse/keyboard, speakers (and thier location around your computer/room particularly a sub if you have one), and the temp of your room
What OS are you using?
What applications do you have running in the back-ground?
What settings do you have on for EQ? models, texture quality/compression, sound, dynamic lighting, resolution, ect...
Are you running EQ in a window or full-screen?
Is EQ set to run the same refresh rate as your desktop?
Are you over-clocking anything? If so, what and to what speeds?