Windows is driving me nuts. I've been ok with XP for years, but these days it seems to be driving me somewhere else, like to Win 8 (NEVER!) I tried Win 7, but I'm outta there, too! I have a fairly new desktop with three large drives. One has XP Pro, which I'm babying because right now, its all I've got. I had openSUSE 12.2 on dual boot with Win 7, but hadn't really gotten into it when I upgraded from 32 to 64 bits. Suse was corrupted, apparently, because it turned into yellow and pink vertical stripes. You could see that SUSE was trying to run behind the striped screen. I thought that was because it was installed at 32 bits, so I reinstalled it at 64 bits, but no difference.
I tried Linux Mint on another drive, but it also had the vertical stripes. I was under the impression that Linux was OK with 64bits.
I'm also having troubles loading Linux into ex-Windows drives, with "NTLDR is missing" failures. I thought that was only a DOS/Windows issue, but its showing up on Linux-only installation attempts.
I produce a 32-40 page monthly booklet for my church, using Scribus, and maintain finances for my non-profit with Gnucash. Actually, I haven't used any Microsoft stuff for years. It's been Thunderbird, Firefox, Scribus, and other Linux stuff all along, running it from Windows, so it seems like the time to run it from Linux. But I'm having fits trying to get started!

The stripes sound like a driver issue, but we won't know without some more info on the hardware.

NTLDR is missing is because a bootloader, such as grub, was not installed (or properly) during the installation, so the early boot stages are still looking for the old Windows bootloader. When prompted, you want to install grub to the MBR of the hard drive itself, not to the boot record of a partition. In addition, it must be on the drive the BIOS is looking for the bootload (typically the first drive).

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Thanks for your help, goumba. I have a Gigabyte board, AMD FX cpu, 3 hard drives, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB. Right now, Win XP is on the 1TB. The 500, sold as new, wouldn't accept any data. I finally found it had unidentified data on it, tried to clear it with by loading it with XP, but I got distracted and missed the end of the delete, let some XP get loaded before I shut it off. I loaded it wih a Linux Mint DVD, but I didn't know about mounting it, I thought it self-installed from the DVD. No written instructions.
Ditto for other attempts to load Linux. The 2 TB had a Win 7/openSUSE on it. I was just getting started on SUSE when I upgraded from an older board with a memory problem. While I was copying data from 2 to 500, Win 7 quit on me and refused to reinstall.

As for driver problems, I've run the Gigabyte disk several tims, so I think all te drivers wre loaded. Where would I get drivers for the Linux striping?

This in fact sounds like a driver issue, but sadly you don't give us specifics on your hardware, so we can't know which video device you are using. Since you have an AMD CPU at least this can't be a system with Intel video device, so I would recommend to install the proprietary drivers for your videocard.
Side-question: If you have the exact same problems with 32 and 64 bit versions, how do you come to the conclusion that this is a problem with 64 bit versions?

This neither a Windows or Linux issue, it seems that you haven't installed the bootloader for the OS correctly. Without more information (which distro, disk layout, where have you installed the bootloader, ...) from you we can't help here.

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Mint usually detects if any propriety drivers are needed & offers to install them, after the 1st re-boot.
- did it do that?. particularly for the video card drivers .. .

also - was Mint ok - when using the live_cd - before any installation was done?.

You still have not identified the video adapter, which I'm going to assume is a Radeon. Go to amd.com, and click Drivers & Support, and find your model and OS (Linux 32 or 64bit) when given the drop down boxes.

Paste the output of
This will give us more info with which to help you, if needed

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One minor point to add is that your 64-bit system should be able to run either 64-bit OSes or 32-bit OSes, so that can be left out of the equation.

If you're getting an ntldr error, then you've failed to install grub or whatever bootloader to the correct location.

Your problem in linux is due to whatever video (graphics) card you are using. If you tell us what the video card is, somebody here can help you.