I created an account purely so I could reply, since this is apparently a vanishingly rare issue and I managed to find a workaround. Don't know if you're still having the issue, but for anyone else out there dealing with it....
This glitch popped up on my laptop, a Surface Pro, running the same version of Illustrator but in Windows 8.1 x64 (don't laugh, it's paid for). Some exhaustive testing eliminated the following causes:
* insufficient or malfunctioning RAM
* anything related to rendering that could be frobbed in AIPrefs
* random voodoo AIPrefs corruption ("deleting" it didn't help)
I did a few things to see if maybe it had to do with my video driver – the only things worse than Intel's integrated video processors are the drivers for them – but there's only so far one can test that. Exasperated, I used "one weird trick" that I now recommend with the greatest of hesitation and disappointment:
Install and use the 32-bit version of Illustrator instead.
The only guess I could possibly make is that there's something about the interaction between the 64-bit Illustrator and the two-bit Intel video drivers that's causing the redraw rectangle to become a wreck and a tangle. I still see selection nodes flicker sometimes as though the redraw's knocking them out the same way it did the whole canvas before, but they come right back and the canvas behind is never corrupted.
Now that I think about it, I don't recall seeing the problem until a recent video driver "update".... For once, I might have to blame Intel instead of Adobe. But only this once, aye? Hope this helps.
