all conn. are fine

with hp on the phone...obviously they are exp. jobs in india and I can't understand a darn thing...:-(

there might be a crack in the monitor power lead, whic will cause it to drop every so often. If this is the problem, wiggling it will start the monitor back up.

Next - does you monitor have a timeout? It might think you are doing nothing when you are doing something. Set this value as high as possible.

nothing has been changed on it for 8 months...time out is 1h...
no cracks. hp is changing it,

Yeah. I love deciphering those error messages like, "The OPB or PTB driver may be missing or corrupted or the server is not responding." That along with buttons marked 'OK' & "Cancel'.

Or when I close Outlook, I get an error message, "Normal.dot could not be found. Would you like to create it?" I hit 'No'. A Save box comes up anyway with Normal.dot appearing in the list of files in the directory and Normal.dot in the filename box, to be saved. I hit 'Cancel' and Word opens.

Well, those kinds of problems won't appear as long as your screen is black, I suppose.

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Proud member of FISHTWITCH: doing a bit more than fish exercise now.

I forgot you were a CS prof. You of course would've checked the power settings...

yes, when I asked, I did so because I knew that wasn't exactly a problem with the cable, outlet etc :-)
but HP is pretty good about it and replacing the monitor right away. will be here tuesday.

Windows XP SP2 mixed 64 and 32 bit instructions, some motherboard manufacturers have a hardware level virus detector that says any 64 bit instruction must be a virus. No real quick fix except booting off the CD and rolling back to the last restore point (40 minutes or so).