Alright, you pulled it out of me....I didn't want to admit this for fear the Pro would charge me more for a failed DIY.

I tried the DIY on the MID for about an hour. I got all the screws out (seemed like about 10 including the face and back hump area). Separated the face from the unit (broke the red clamp). I could see the ribbon but couldn't get the unit separated enough to really work on it comfortably (I couldn't get the electrical plugs to separate and didn't want to pull to hard because of their delicate connection to the board). So I just wiped finger nail polish remover on the ribbon with a Q-tip, hoping that would do something - clean the connections. I couldn't figure the rest out on how to separate the connections. The risk seemed very high so I didn't proceed. I put it back together to see if my mild cleaning helped anything, but instead none of the pixels appeared. So I definitely decided that the pro approach was right for me on this one...

MID is in shipping back to me today, so I'll let you know how it turns out.