A sweep (taking several seconds) from top to bottom of the screen to about half brightness of the screen occurs and leaves this message visible in English, French, German Japanese languages:

You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.

MacBook Pro 17", Model Identifier: MacBookPro3,1, OS X 10.5.7, SMC Version (system): 1.18f5, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Any suggestions?

You are experiencing a kernel panic. Read Resolving Kernel Panics for more information.

The information provided in the link above is daunting, to say the least.

Looks like I might well wait for Snow leopard to release, upgrade to a larger hard drive, and do a fresh install of all the stuff I really use, omitting treasures from years gone by that I really never will get back to.....sigh.....House cleaning my computers is not something I look forward to.....

For now, I guess I will try some of the simpler fixes suggested.

If defective hardware is causing the kernel panics, reinstalling won't solve the problem. Bad RAM is often the issue. Don't make the mistake of thinking that Apple RAM can't go bad; it can and does. Apple does not manufacture its own RAM.

Try the steps in that article and let us know how it goes.

Thanks for the follow up advice.

I will follow the steps and let you know how it turns out.

To be continued....

John