MacBook Messes with my Monitor

Hi,
I'm new to Mac, and this is really wierd.
I'm hooking up a 19inch BenQ monitor to my MacBook via a VGA adaptor I bought with the MacBook Pro.
It detected the external monitor immediately, wonderful. After several hours, however, the monitor went dark. If I unplugged it, and plugged it back in, I'd catch a glimpse of screen, before it went dark again.
I tried plugging the external monitor back into a Windows machine, and had *the same* symptoms!
After unplugging the mains from the monitor and waiting 30secs, I could reconnect it to the mac and everything was fine again.
However, this problem keeps repeating! Somehow the Mac is messing with the monitor, causing it to go dark until I completely unplug it from the mains, allow it some time to loose all it's state, and plug it back in.
What on earth is happening?

I've got a bit closer to the root cause.
If I leave the MBP alone for about half an hour and it shuts down the displays, the external monitor flickers back into life for a moment then goes black (although it's LED still shows it's connected).
After that, nothing but unplugging it from the mains will help.
My god, what bad experience I'm having with Macs so far... over heating, short cuts not working, monitors ceasing to function properly... it's hardly what I expected after shelling out three times as much as I would have for a windoze/linux machine!

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Message was edited by: mdopp

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Message was edited by: qwertyphd

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