The solutions that I provided should fix (2), even in older version of ParaView. Since this was the original cause to upgrade, I suggest sticking to the fix I suggested and an old version of ParaView. I am pretty sure that all the other issues that you are seeing are related to your graphics card/drivers. When you upgrade your machine, I recommend upgrading to the latest ParaView as we continually improve it.
I have got a similar problem (with this octree mesh approach) relating to contour surfaces - which appear to be discontinuous across octree level changes.
Is there a similar fix to the streamline one (interpolator with cell locator) but for contour surfaces ?
