A couple of thoughts occurred as I read this update, but it wasn't clear what you were looking at, so I'll make these points:

This is a typical monitor shot on my computer. Pardon the distortion--I turned off my flash and held my breath to keep the camera still. You don't see the actual edge of the monitor without the flash, and with a dark background your best clue is the edge of the blue bar at the bottom. I actually have two side-by-side monitors, attached via an NVidia card so I could run up to four monitors. These are set to display separate stuff, as if it was one large very wide screen. But even if I were to use just one monitor, I don't use my browser screen out to the edges. I typically have several browser windows open (though most of them will be minimized and I work back and forth between them) and I have a dark background so I'm not staring at a lot of white. The desktop image I'm using lately is one that I think I picked up after visiting a site that Rapaire linked to. It had lots of astronomy shots (NASA is a great place for that kind of photo also).

I learned something new this evening--my monitors weren't refreshing at the same rate. I set them both at 72hz (one only goes that high, the other goes up to 75, so I chose what was highest between them).

I've been away hunting for (and not finding) glue sticks for my son for a while. The conversation may have progressed way past this point (or into something other than cats and computers). Apologies if I've missed a few beats.

SRS