Figured id give this a shot tonight on a few laptop displays i have since i wanna do a projector somtime, but didnt wanna do it to a good screen untill i had the experience.
So i used the water soak meathod on a old dead 15" dell i had. soaked the thing with warm water and paper towel, and used a coated cardboard roll to get the air out.
thing peeled in one peice after 2 hours.

So i figured, this isnt so hard! i can do this to my tablet pc's display to make it brighter. there are two layers of AG on that thing, one on the lcd itself and one on the glass overlay.

used the same process and the ag came off in a single sheet again without effort.

now... my display works, but it doesnt completly change the pixels anymore. Like, when it starts up, you will see the windows startup logo in the middle even after the desktop has already loaded. its faint, but still there. same with menu's.

Also, my inverter is making a lot of noise for some reason, which is weird, since i didnt touch it aside from unplugging stuff from it.

I probably did something wrong with this so id like advice on what it might have been... could the water have been too hot? i just used tap water which cooled pretty quickly and polished the polarizers with distilled.

other news... after i found out the screen was kinda not so happy, tried to take it all appart again and figure out what was up... yea. broke the glass overlay for the tablet.. that sheet is REALLY easy to break without the antiglare.

all this to get a little more brightness out of my display... and readability outside =( new screen for $195 =(

mmm i cant remembers if LCD's do this too but if you leave it on a fixed image for a long time it gets burned into the screen. Thats probably just the old monitors though, i cant remember.

"burn in" is a problem with CRTs, and with some plasma screens. It should never be a problem with LCDs. The only thing that I could figure there is maybe you damaged the LCD layer when you removed the AG.

Hopefully though, you read all the warnings posted in all of the AG removal threads.

seems to have corrected itself somewhat. all i have to do is polish it up again and put a peice of plastic over it to protect it from my writing =). Was really easy to remove though. i was all set up for a long grueling process but no.. just wet her down with hot water, spread it out nicely, went and watched an anime ep, came back and repeated =) 2 hours and it came off in one sheet without even holding the panel down heh.maybe i just didnt dry off my ffc's well enough or somthing.
now i can read it outdoors too, so im happy.

This may sound strange, but are you sure you have maintained a good ground between the electronics board attached directly to the panel and the controller?

I had a similar situation recently, where, when turning off the LCD I noticed image retention. I was powering the backlight I was using for testing separately, so the backlight was on after the LCD was turned off.
It turned out that if I connected a ground between the panel electronics and the controller electronics, it didn't happen anymore. It looked like the transistors weren't shut completely off in the area where a specific image was until I had a proper ground

In normal operation, the panel electronics get grounded to the LCD panel frame, and it gets grounded to the controller in some way via the frame. Although the panel connection (via LVDS cable) itself had 3 signal grounds, it did make a difference adding the direct ground connection.

No idea if that will help in any way at all, just a possibility.

EDIT: Just read your update, which you posted after I started writing... I'm guessing you are right, and maybe you didn't have the ffc's completely dry!

Thanks for the suggestion. im not sure how i will go about the grounding though. Should i ground it to my inverter cover or what? I simply reconnected everything back the way it was, although the tape isnt really in good condition all around.

im still having some issues with the screen. not image retention but the edges of the screen a lot higher contrast than the middle. you can see a round cornered rectangle in the screen that is more washed out and less contrasty in the right conditions, maybe i didnt put it back onto the backlight properly? or maybe the backlighting isnt sandwiched right anymore?

tricky mod this heh. looks so much better though outdoors.

does anyone know why i might have a huge hotspot on my lcd from the backlight? did i apply too much heat to the panel with the water? too much pressure?

Here is what im looking at. seems a lot like the glowies but why in the center and not on the edges? the dark streak is mark in the backside polarizer which i cant buff out. maybe ill order some new film and strip both sides but i can see that ending badly.
I also get something that looks like scanlines of a crt when the refresh rate it is too low. kinda annoying and it isnt the inverter.

That shadow around the outside looks like the shadow that would be caused by the white plastic on the back of the LCD panel.
When you took this apart, are you sure you got the various reflective sheets, etc in the correct order?

Also, it may be due to the backlight being overdriven. If they are overdriven due to a bad inverter providing to high a voltage, or an incorrect one, the backlight can be so bright that the plastic on the back can be seen through the front of the panel.

I actually see the same thing on two 17" panels that I can overdrive the backlights on (with an incorrect inverter) and they look just like that, with the dark shadow around the outside.

Check and see if the back of your LCD has plastic in that shape, but not in the middle section.

Also, are you sure this thing didn't get damaged on one of the FFCs?

Good Luck!

thing is, you can see the spot wen you hold the panel up to a light though. i tested it without signal, just the backlight and its there. the rear polarizer is starting to get a little scuffed and marked now. so i think when it gets a little more annoying, i might try to replace it. what kind of polar's are used on the backside, the side that is mirror like?

is it possible i used water that was too hot for this? no ffc damage that i can see. i babied those things =).