T61p won't wake from standby "sleep transition unsuccessful"

[Mr. Goodbar]

Two days ago my T61p lost the ability to rouse itself from sleep. I've been running Vista 64 for a couple of years on this system before this started happening. Now, when I try to wake the system (by pressing the Fn key), it starts to wake and immediately shuts off, sort of like a car that won't turn over.

The HD light turns on, I can hear the drive spin up, and a second later the light goes dark and the system returns to sleep mode with an audible click. I've tried changing power supplies and doing this docked/undocked. Nothing works and I have to hold down the power key and do a cold reboot. Here's a link to a video (http://flickr.com/gp/mrgoodbar/47x108) I took on my cell phone of me trying to wake the laptop three times (you can hear the drive spin up and then machine die.) (Sorry for the poor video quality, I don't use my phone as a video camera often...just wanted to illustrate the weird behavior.)

When the system comes back up my windows event log always shows this error: "The last sleep transition was unsuccessful. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, failed, or lost power during the sleep transition." Any ideas? Hibernate doesn't work either..but I haven't used it before so don't know if this is new.

[RealBlackStuff]

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/For ... c43a1419c5
http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/vi ... ernate.htm