Q: External Monitor "out of range" when Macbook is closed.

I have a late 2009 13-in macbook that i cannot get to work with my external monitor when the lid is closed. The monitor works great when the lid is open in a variety of display resolutions. The display has worked for a few seconds at a time in the past but never longer than that. The computer does not go to sleep when this happens and the display does pick up the signal... it just changes to be out of range regardless of what resolution the screen is in when I close it.

I have deleted the plist files associated with the display and system preferences along with a variety of other solutions that I found on the web and can't seem to get any of them to work including installing the latest OS X El Capitan (10.11.6).

Any thoughts?