2011 Macbook Pro Failure

This afternoon around lunch time I was checking Facebook on my Macbook Pro when I encountered something entirely new.  As I was scrolling down the screen my screen froze and I could hear the fans on my Macbook Pro kicking into high gear.  After a minute or two my Macbook Pro rebooted but it would not boot back up for me to use it.  It would boot to a gray screen and then sit there with the Fans screaming.  I then disconnected my Macbook Pro from my KVM and tried to boot it connected to nothing but power and it still would not boot beyond that gray screen.  I tried everything I could think of and could not get the system to boot.

Through some patience and trial and error I was able to get my Macbook to boot for a short while but it failed again as soon as I plugged in my external monitor.

After this I decided to do some research and found that I was not alone.  There were many reports of 2011 Macbook Pros failing with issues related to the Discrete Graphics Adapter in them.  I went ahead and made an appointment at the Apple Store for the next time I could make it and did some reading to see how bad it really was.

Here is one of the more active sources of the information that I have found in relation to this issue.

Discussion in Apple Support Forums.  There are over 11K responses in this thread.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577?start=0&tstart=0

Going to try more tonight to see what I can do.