Yesterday, when I turned on my LCD monitor, the colors were very very bright. It looks as if someone had gone into the monitor on-screen-display and turned up brightness & contrast all the way to the max. Colors were washed out, and it's almost painful to look at. So I tried to go into the menu and see if the settings were wrong somehow...and I found that I cannot bring up the menu. All the buttons on the front of the monitor now do nothing, except the power button.

I was able to go into my graphics card settings, and turn the brightness way down to compensate, so it's at least usable for now, but it's not quite right, there is definitely some loss of color resolution or something from the two extreme settings canceling each other out.

Any ideas what kind of failure in the LCD might cause this?

According to the control panel, the model number is: KL2490DW-D

It's a 24" 1920x1200 with the brand "synaps".