I have a 420 watt ATX power supply. Its about 3 years old. that may be the issue, never thought of that
I also did NOT swap out the power cables to the monitor so i will give that a try when i get home

thanks for the good ideas gents


Dell Trinitron Monitor
420 watt ATX power supple
Asus A7N8X-E motherboard
GeForce 6600GT video card
60 gb HDD @ 7200rpm
640 megashits of DDR2 PC3200 RAM
AMD athlon XP 3000+
WinXP pro SP2

anything else?