This happened today, haven't had the issue before it happened just as I left a station, when i warped to another sector the issue was gone [sorry, don't remember the sector i was in, would have been Dau sector probably main station L11]:

http://users.on.net/~var/ven1.jpg
http://users.on.net/~var/ven2.jpg
http://users.on.net/~var/ven3.jpg
http://users.on.net/~var/ven4.jpg

gfx card: nvidia geforce fx 5600XT 256mb ddr
driver: nvidia binary driver 6629 (patched)
kernel: 2.6.9
distro: Debian GNU/Linux 3.1

Way to capture the moments before my embarrasing defeat at the hands of a single Seeker...
Those glitches look a lot like some of the things that may happen if you open a garbage file in a SNES emulator.
Are you running the latest version of NVidia's drivers? Any DGA/XVideo apps running in the background? Did you switch to a console recently? Running any untrusted modules? If it never happens again it probably won't matter anyway, but...
-:sigma.SB

Yeah i'm running the latest drivers, I also run my games in a seperate X session so if something funky happens my "normal"/workstation X session is left alone. I do switch to console and back quite a lot, but at this time I hadn't done so.

I just wanted to point it out ;)

Were you running VO in a window?
nvidia drivers are kinda bad at recovering lost textures in Linux.

Sorry for the late reply, haven't been vendetta-ing since my mouse died, another mouse is on it's way :)

Nope, I always run Vendetta in full screen, haven't ever had this happen and it hasn't happened again, I will let you know if it does though.