But I suspect that if the player is in standby, the display buffer probably still has "stuff" in it, it's just that the VFD isn't getting juice. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

You are correct, sir. You can prove this by putting the player in Standby mode while the Displayserver applet has the screen up. Some visuals will still animate when the player is in standby. Kind of interesting, really.

(I haven't actually done this trick since 1.03, though, not sure if it still works.)