If your REALLY cheap, you can find good deals on used CRT monitors.

If you are going to buy new, find a decent widescreen LCD.

As far as 19" monitors non-widescreen go, it seems like a lot of them
are 5:4, but that's only a small point.

Personally, I don't really watch a lot of movies on my pc, or play many
games, so a widescreen monitor is not that attractive.  I have a 19"
5:4, that I can pivot 90 degrees.  I like that, but might go for a
larger 4:3 on the next round.

I do have a widescreen monitor, however, hooked up to an xbox that I use
as a media center.  There the widescreen makes a lot of sense.

The lingering question, though, is if your video card will support the
native resolution of the widescreen monitor of choice.  Video memory is
not a problem for any reasonably contemporary card, (your MX4000 should
be fine) but for whatever reason, the widescreen resolutions seem to be
less supported.

A pretty common native resolution for a 22" widescreen LCD is 1680 x
1050.  I see that ubuntu users are apparently getting that resolution
out of the card, but couldn't guarantee it for windows.

If your 19" was a CRT, a 22" LCD has a much larger screen
area.  If your 19" was LCD, a 22" has roughly 10% more area,
though more usable realestate due to (typically) higher
resolution.  Whether that space is truely useful in your
particular applications depends on what you run and your
ability to adapt to the new resolution - just as anyone has
to do with any resolution change.

Not necessarily, they are generally designed for a certain
minimum width which tends to be either 1024 or 1280 on sites
that are updated more often and have less considerate
webmasters.  As for height, that's just a matter of how much
you have to scroll.  If we were instead to look at the shape
of the typical sought-after content on a page, where there
is often navigation and advertising on the left and right
sides, then the best monitor resolution would probably be a
page view style about 1280 wide by 2400 tall, except that TN
panels are popular in monitors and don't do well when the
viewing angle deviates much from 90'.

?  No you won't, download and install a recent driver from
http://www.nvidia.com for your video card (after
uninstalling the old one) and you can set a custom
resolution (which in the case of 22" would be 1680x1050)
which makes use of all available space, no black bars on the
sides.

Further, many monitors default mode of operation is that if
you were to output a non-native resolution (native
resolution is always recommended since it is a much sharper
image) then the display on the screen would stretch out to
fill all available space.  The nVidia drivers also tend to
have settings where you can control this behavior, whether
it stretch out or put the black bars on the sides to keep
the correct aspect ratio.  Regardless, it should allow
setting the proper resolution so this wouldn't be a factor.

19" LCD aren't 4:3 usually, they're either widescreen also,
or some are 5:4 as 1280x1024.

Get the 22" unless the budget is tight and you want the
slight cost savings.

that depends on the graphics card i don't think your present graphics card
would do the job very well on the size of screen you want

I recently bought a 22" widescreen and it works just fine.
Once you set it to native resolution there is no distortion.

I'm sure your video card can run at whatever resolution is needed.

A 22" widescreen is almost exactly the same height as a 19" 4x3 CRT
monitor.  I've never measured a 19" 4x3 LCD, but generally the
advertised diagonal size of an LCD is accurate, not 1" greater, as it
is for CRTs.

If you're thinking of a 22" widescreen LCD, be sure there's a windows
driver for your graphics card that supports the LCD's native
resolution, which is probably 1650 x 1050 for a 22", or the picture
will look fuzzy.

Why did your 19" monitor fail?  Most CRT monitor failures simple and
cheap for DIY fix, so at the very least don't toss it in the trash but
give it to somebody who can fix it. All of my 19" monitors have come
from the trash, and even I was able to get every one working without
much work.