Various graphics-related corruption/errors/misrendering with Mountain Lion

I have just experienced the same problem. I noticed graphic artefacts on my desktop, but did not worry about it until Transmission failed to start. Couple of iterations later I restarted it from iTerm (thus bypassing launchd), and it worked. I shrugged shoulders and rebooted - now that was a mistake.

Pretty much all apps that use default MacOS windows rendering engine could not start, including Finder. This meant I could not start iTerm or Terminal either. The likes of Chrome, VLC, Sonos and iTunes, which use their own window renderer, worked. I got a very similar stacktrace all the time bar the last call - not strdup, but memmove, also from stdlib. Surprisingly enough, when I tried to log in as another user, everything still worked.

I tried resetting SMC and PRAM to no avail. Then I rebooted in safe mode, in which rendering worked, and rebooted back to the normal mode. This helped. At least I can launch apps now - but Finder crashes and relaunches every now and then occasionally.