Focus assist broken?

I have a G3 and it seems that my focus assist light is no longer working. At least it's not turning on. I checked the camera settings in the menu and the lamp is set to "on" So now I have a couple questions

1. Has anyone else had this problem? Is there something I'm doing wrong it always turned on before. Could it be burnt out?

2 is this light used by the camera to focus or is it just there for the user to manually focus? If that's the case no big deal because I rarely manually focus.

Off this subject, I have a 420ex flash but I've noticed that when I use it my pictures are often slightly blurry. When using the onboard flash the pictures are sharp but the flash just washes everything out too much. I usually shoot in auto mode sometimes in program mode with the flash up for bounce ans also use the stofen omnibounce.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Kevin

have you tried turning on red eye and using flash just to focus?
this should shine the af assist beam...
not sure what's wrong with it if it isn't working if you've tried that but you could live without it...
it's basically just there to remove red eye and help with af in dark conditions...so you haven't lost much...

Turned on the red eye and the light now lights back up!