I think I am headed towards a serious problem with my computer.

Three times in the past couple of days my monitor (An Acer AL2216W) has gone black, then showed the Acer power-up logo, followed by a "No Signal" text box, the status LED showed yellow, and then nothing.

Fiddling with the connectors (power and signal) gives no change. Cycling the power on the monitor just repeats the power-up logo and the "No Signal" information. Re-booting (not power-off restart, just a re-boot) instantly restores the video.

From these symptoms I conclude that the monitor itself is OK, since power-cycling it causes it to display the Acer logo and the "No Signal" warning.

So, the question is: is my video card (An NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS w/256 MB RAM) going tits-up, is it some weirdness with my motherboard or the Vista OS, could it be a problem with one of my 2-GB RAM strips (When I recently added the second strip I had a problem with no video that got resolved when I swapped their positions, possibly dirty contacts), maybe something over-heating (I removed all the dust and cat hair from inside the computer when I added the second RAM strip), or is it the tooth fairy getting back at me for complaining when I was ten about only getting a lousy dime for my back molar?

Any troubleshooting suggestions would be welcome.

tanstaafl.