sorry for the delayed response. funny enough, i am on a different computer and the pictures above looks perfectly fine as well. of couse on my mac it looks terrible with blue lines all over it.
i took it back to the apple store and they said it's either the display cable (might have that wrong, some sort of cable) possibly not put back in correctly OR that the display is now bad. if it's just the cable then no big deal, they'll just reseat it correctly. if it's the display or LED going out then i'd have to buy a new one. of course it was perfectly fine prior to them taking the display of to replace the internal hard drive. and, OF COURSE, they're saying it's just bad luck/coincidence that it's now gone bad. they certainly couldnt possibly have messed it up while messing around with the computer. they were nice enough to try and get someone to look at it right then since it's at least a 45 minute drive one way from my house to them and they had it mon-fri of last week to do the internal hard drive. i left and walked around the mall to give them 30 minutes, got back and they said they'd have to keep it because the screw they needed to unscrew to get into it was stripped. HELLO, they're the only ones that have been in the computer so they would have been the ones to strip it. when i asked if that perhaps could be indicative of someone not really taking much care in what they were doing and perhaps they did somehow mess up the display it was again, 'oh no, not possible just bad timing if it went out.' that was on saturday and now i'm just waiting for them to get back to me to let me know if it's just the cable that needs to be reconnected or if i have to pay more money to replace the display (and, of course, if it is the display that has now coincidentally started to go bad i'm out the $250 from replacing the hard drive even though it's still brand new--wont give me some sort of credit to just go towards a new mac). very, very frustrating!!
thanks again for trying to help!