Compaq nw8440 LCD randomly forgets to turn on

I recently had to have the motherboard replaced on my HP Compaq nw8440 due to a bad DMA controller. About a week after I got the board replaced, I turned the machine on one day, and the screen was split, squished and doubled. The HP logo showed up twice; once on the top half on the screen and once on the bottom half of the screen. The GRUB menu and the XP boot screens were the same way, but once windows was up, everything was back to normal!

The next day, I turned it on, and the screen wouldn't come on at all. Everything SEEMED to be working fine (judging by the HD activity), but there was no screen. I pulled the battery, held the power button down, and everything was fine again for about a month.

Last week, I turned it on, and it again forgets to turn on the screen. This has happened two more time since then. Sometimes the backlight comes on; other times, it's totally dead. Pulling the battery and holding the power button fixes it every time. Does anyone have any ideas as to why it's doing this? Will reflashing the BIOS help??

Thanks.

 

*bump* anyone??

I will add that I've *never* had the issue occur when my laptop is on it's docking station

 

UPDATE: Today, I went to recover my laptop from standby, and it was *VERY* slow. It first came up at the normal 1920x1200 resolution, then briefly switched to 800x600 (or something ridiculously low), and then back. When I opened up ATi Catalyst, it showed that there was an external LCD and a TV attached to the machine and disabled, even though nothing was plugged in to my laptop!. The machine crashed on shutdown. I'm wondering if that has anything to do with the screen not turning on sometimes on startup (the machine thinks there's an external monitor attached when there really isn't)

I held the power button down for 30 seconds with the battery removed, then shot some air (not compressed) into the docking station connector. So far, so good, but only time will tell at this point.

Could a dirty/shorted dock connector be the cause of these issues???

 

...Anyone...?