Here's what I think about dead and stuck pixels. Most monitors are going to have some, so basically you're trying to go for a relatively clean one (doesn't have to be fully clean).
When I was at Circuit City, I was looking at a generic 17" LCD with really good specs. The display model had 2 that were towards the lower middle of the screen. I knew that buying from CC was good since they have a 30 day no-hassle return policy. My LCD also had a 1 year warranty if anything else came up.
At home I searched around for dead and stuck pixels, and I found one red and one green near the bottom right (about an inch away from the systray). I'm cool with that since that's the same number the display model had, they're in a very unimportant location, and with the color combination, only one will be obvious at at a time (green barely shows up on white, for example). So I kept the LCD
Oh, and don't look too hard

If you try looking too hard, you may start finding dozens of messed-up pixels that actually turn out to be dust causing diffraction on the screen!