Hm, that reminds me of the trouble I had on my old GeForce 260 when Rhino5 was in beta. It made banding like that on all kinds of stuff and that’s when I first bought the AMD FirePro v7900 and then the Quadro 4000 (because the v7900 had ugly AA …ah those were the good old times! ) If I remember correctly Jeff managed later on to make a patch that fixed rhino so it worked fine on the 260.
So it can be graphic card and driver related. Which also makes sense since you are talking about shifting applications. I guess @jeff might be able to help you out if you provide some hardware data by typing in SystemInfo and paste the output here.
Does it happen when you shift between another app that uses the graphic card for 3D stuff, or can it also happen if you shift between Rhino and Word or a net browser?
+1 for a penguin style display mode thought! I would love that too!