The desktops entire display blanked out, yet the monitor continued to display that it was receiving signal. Regardless of what I did, it wouldn’t display anything! Managed to RDP into it from the laptop and found everything working perfectly fine. On reboot everything worked as normal. Obviously I made sure the male VGA connector was properly inserted, and reseated it, but that didn’t make any difference.
The big question is it a fluke, or associated to the freak overheat a while back? Either way, it doesn’t bode well be it the hardware (GPU, Mobo) or software (crap driver, crap Windows kernel).