Yep, I cheated. Bought a 1 DIN carput after trying to use laptops with little success. Tried the auto power on module from w3bma5t3r:
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/members/w3bma5t3r.html
He was very helpful but I found the laptop was clumsy and never really got it working properly.The Lilliput carput works really well, so far. Cost me ~A$960 on ebay -can get it cheaper than that but I upped the memory to 1G and Harddisk to 120Gb. There are some threads about it.
The monitor is under warranty, so unfortunatley I can't pull it open. Not sure of any brand names. I'm sure the guys at LinITX will help with all the dimension details of LCD and PCB. They get back quickly.