Hi brendank,
I have not tried connecting them together by firewire, but they both are connected together by a hardware firewall/router. However, you could be on to something and an inexpensive piece of firewire just might do the trick.
But yes, my "bad" OS X Lion otherwise does appear to be quite dysfunctional. Yes, it "bongs" at startup, if I listen carefully I can hear its hard drive, the led appears at front, but yes, no picture. And yes, one of the first things that I did was to swap the monitor connections, just to be sure, but again no picture.
Meanwhile, I thank you for the links that you mentioned.