Another note on the technical side: If your backlight is working, so is your inverter, no need to replace it.

You can use Autoruns from sysinternals.com to check what is automatically started: http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Autoruns.html

You should be able to change the LCD brightness to high in the Thinkpad Configuration Utility in your Control Panel.

There are also rumours that 'p' means pricey

I can only reiterate that you should only do this if you know what you are doing. I know my way around PCI, but using pcitree I managed to overwrite word 0 of the eeprom (still no idea how that happened) on the mini-pci card in my R50p. Now, word 0 holds the device identifier of the card, so the mac...