A couple of months ago a power surge "fried" some of the inputs on my TV. As a result I get a picture with bright whites from my VCR plugged into one composite input, and for my DVD I only get a good picture if I plug in a composite and S-video cable at the same time (each one alone doesn't get a good picture!). (The local TV repair guy claimed to have fixed it twice, but it is still not working properly). I recently purchased a receiver that allows me to route all of the cables into it and just have one cable to the TV. The installation is such that I would need a long video cable to get from the receiver to the TV. This is only a temporary arrangement and I do not know if the component input on the TV is good or not as I don't have a component cable and i don't want to buy a cable just to find out if the input is good. I have two questions.

1) In order to test the component input on the TV to see if it is "fried" (there wasn't anything plugged into it at the time of the power surge), is it possible to use a composite cable as a substitute for the component cable (eg Y to Y, R to Pr, and W to Pb) or is there something different in the construction of composite and component cables that would cause a problem? If it is OK to do this then is there any advantage (apart from color coding) to buying a component cable, as i aready have a long composite cable?

2) When I bring the signal from my cable box to the receiver, which is the best cable to use, co-axial video cable or composite? Since I will (hopefully) be using a component cable to get from the receiver to the TV, it seems that the video signal will be compromised by the "weakest link" in the system. Since co-axial cable is used coming from the wall to the cable box, does this mean that it is a better signal transmitter than composite video cable?