Turning off lcd monitor backlight

I have scoured google for a solution to my problem but as yet have not had any success... here's the issue. I have set KDE to use power management for the monitor and to turn off the monitor after x minutes. Once x minute arrives, the monitor turns black, but the backlight does not turn off. To try and determine the problem, I issue these commands:

xset dpms force off - results in same blank screen backlight still on
vbetool dpms off - results in backlight turning off (this is the desired behavior)

I had also tried to edit xorg.conf to set dpms on and set time to blank with no success.

Apparently, the hardware is capable of turning off the monitor backlight, but xset or KDE's power management isn't doing so properly.

My issue then is how do I get the backlight to go off with xset or KDE's power management OR how do I write a script to monitor how long the screen saver has been on and invoke the vbetool command to turn it off and subsequently monitor for mouse/keyboard activity (or screensaver termination if that is still monitoring activity) and invoke vbetool dpms on?

Any solution to this problem will help more than just myself from what I see in my searches!