HELP!!! Monitor on the fritz

My monitor only flashes on and off...
As my wife and I were getting ready to leave his morning our 22 month old son decided to be "helpful " and turn off the desktop pc. He figured out several months ago what the button on the front of the tower does and hit it powering off the computer before Windows shut down. No biggie, just reboot when we get home and go about our business, right???
WRONG!!! Now when we try to turn the computer on everything boots up fine except the montior. It only flashes on and off. I've checked wires, I've done several restarts, unplugged the monitor for a while, and just about everything else I could think of short of breaking out the sledge-hammer.
Anybody got any ideas what it could be? I've never ran into anything like this and don't even know where to start looking. No idea if its in the pc or the monitor. I'm assuming its in the monitor itself because it even flashes if I turn it on without being connected to the computer, instead of showing the test pattern like it should.
Its a SyncMster 206 BW from Samsung that I bought a couple of years ago and since I no longer have a receipt, they've pretty much made it clear on their support site that they're not interested.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

well we have to try and narrow all the possible causes down

is it the monitor, try connecting it to another computer and see if it works, a nice laptop with a vga port on the side will work fine

is it the computer, unless your video card is onboard i would reccomend buying a new video card for one of the pci slot, but if the problem is the computer video output and the plugs are onboard, that means that the whole motherboard might be broken but still go out and buy a video card for pci connection

 

Its the monitor... Got my hands on an old crappy crt and hooked it up and BAM!! So I guess I'm in the market for a new monitor.
Any suggestions? The broken monitor is a 20" Samsung 206BW. I was looking on the EGG last night and found a couple that piqued my interest (price tag mostly).
They have a 23" Asus for 159 and a 22" Acer for 120ish and of course alot more with bigger price tags. Don't know much about either one since this Samsung was my first LCD. I'm not even sure WHAT I need as far as screen ratios and refresh rates and such.
This system is kind of a Do-All, I use it for mostly gaming, Crysis, Far-Cry and things like that, but my wife is a forum hound that spends hours a day on her "Mommy Site". I noticed on the comments of a few of the monitors that people had said some monitors were better for games than text, while others were better for text than games. Personally I thought a monitor was a monitor. Any suggestions on one that would go good for each or is that just picky people looking for something complain about?
Guess the good side is, I finally have an LCD I can take take aprt and see how it works.LOL

 

whatever works best for you, what do you use this machine for?

 

I personally use it mostly for games like Crysis, Far-Cry and such, but my wife spends quite a bit of time on forum sites and web surfing.