Power LED would illuminate and the monitor wold turn on and off like it should, but the picture would only flash for a brief moment.
PROBLEM:
CCFL backlights were not lighting up. Plugging in an external set of known good CCFL's indicated that all 4 light ports were getting the same amount of power before they all 4 would shut off. This was apparent because they all would get about 1/4 of the way illuminated. Think of them as progress bars. If one of them was less than the others, chances are that the problem would be found in that particular light's circuitry. Since all 4 were the same, the problem must be the power coming into the inverter portion of the board. Like if normal operating voltage was 12v, if you only dumped 5v into the circuit it would barely power up and then the integrated failsafe circuitry would tell the whole inverter to shut down because there is a problem somewhere.
SOLUTION:
This one was a real booger. There's a fuse that controls the power into the inverter section. Usually if it goes out, it will be open and therefore no power gets through it at all. That is the purpose of a fuse, after all. So of course it was the last thing I checked, as I could see that there was some power getting to the lights. So after recapping the whole board, changing all of the inverter IC's and poly caps, and even trying a few other transformers in place of some that looked suspicious (even though I knew better, as a bad transformer would be indicated by the external CCFL test I did), I finally started probing for power while it was live (my least favorite thing to do, I'm a little girl when it comes to getting shocked!). The input side of the fuse was a steady 18v, the other side was jumping around, 5v up to 8v, 11v, 3v. "How very fucking odd", I thought to myself. Oops I cussed. Oh well, nobody reads this anyway. I just do it for the SEO purposes on my web site, lots of text about fixing monitors gives Google a boner. So back to the monitor, I replaced the fuse anyway, still not believing what my meter was telling me. It was indeed the problem. I celebrated by doing a modernized version of an old Indian "Rain Dance". This new version includes shaking/slapping my booty like a Chip and Dales dancer. It's pretty cool.
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