I believe I solved the mystery about the lcd....
Monday I was sent back to the clients house with yet another lcd and rubber feet and some plastics. Prior to returning Fridays parts, I jotted down the manufacturer's name and part number off the lcd I was returning. I figured I could compare that to the lcd I was going to attempt to install against that and the old lcd that worked flawlessly.
After I arrived, I noticed the old lcd was still working good. So I decided to connect the new lcd to the laptop and test.
The results were the same as the other day...It wouldn't display the desktop in Vista.
So while it was still connected, I went into safe mode and removed the video card from the device manager. Then rebooted into standard mode. The desktop showed generically because the card hadn't been redetected yet. After re-detections, the system wanted to be restarted.
I restarted the system and got the same results. Since I was forced to power off the system and not do a gracefull shutdown, Vista came up wanting to do a boot repair...did that and got the same results. So after another not so graceful shutdown, Vista wanted to do a boot repair and a system restore so I let it.
This time it actually worked.
When I got to the desktop, Vista warned that it had recovered from a video driver crash! Since it was now working finally, I went ahead and replaced the lcd. I also compared the old lcd with what I was putting in. The origional was made by LG/ Philips...the new one made by Samsung. Both were 17" WXGA+ screens.
So while there was ultimately a problem with software...that problem didn't exist until the manufacturer decided to provide a "substitute" replacement lcd instead of sticking with the origional model. Had this been explained to me by the manufacturer in the first place, there might not have been an argument about it being a bad lcd or a software issue.
Software is all to easy to blame for problems. I guess admitting that your hardware is what's causing the software problem is not so easy to admit.
So in all reality it wasn't a bad lcd or bad software...it was a manufacturer being bad and not disclosing all the facts and then being anal about it when confronted.