Users have reported seeing blinking trees on the screen in the new release Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (PC).

Large tree sprites (images) continuously flash on top of multiple other plant objects endlessly, completely ruining the gameplay experience.

If you are experiencing this, the fix is simple. This bug is apparently caused by the use of ALT+Tab to switch out of the game window.

While this issue will likely be solved in a patch soon (which will hopefully solve the dead zone steering issue!), simply do not use ALT+Tab in the meantime.

Update 08/22/2011: It has been corroborated twice that you can overcome this bug by lowering your shadow level in the graphics options.