10.4.8 MBP sleeping issues?

[Nils Holland]

Hi folks,

I just want to ask if any of you have ever seen one or both of two 
sleep-related issues that seem to plague MBP (and possibly also other 
Intal-Mac) owners ever since the 10.4.8 update last year. The first 
symptom, which I have seen on my CoreDuo MBP is the following:

The computer randomly wakes from sleep. This can easily be seen by the 
fact when waking it up, a blue screen appears for a short period of 
time. This is the same blue screen you see while the computer is 
shutting down or while the login window is displayed. After a second or 
so, the blue screen fades to black, showing the normal password dialog 
box instead (if the machine is set to ask for a password when resuming 
from sleep / from the screen saver). A minute or so later, the machine 
just goes to sleep again all by itself.

When looking at system.log, it says that an USB event triggered the 
wake. However, there don't really have to be any USB devices connected 
for this to happen (I know that when you remove a USB device while in 
sleep, the computer will wake up for a short time, but no such 
disconnection is happening here). Another interesting thing system.log 
says when this happens is something like "Failed to reset device 000010" 
or so, or at least I have not seen such a line present during a "normal" 
user-initiated wake from sleep. Furthermore, this also doesn't have to 
do with the lid accidentally thinking it has been opened, as it can 
happen as well when sleeping with lid open all the time.

Let me add that this whole "random-wake-and-sleep-again" thing doesn't 
happen often and "quickly". It might in fact take a few hours of sleep 
before the incident occurs. The other incident some people have noticed 
is MBPs failing to go to sleep when closing the lid. Instead, these 
users had to put their machine to sleep manually before closing it. I 
can't say mich about this issue, as I'm always starting sleep before I 
close the lid.

As I said, the random wake issue first happened to me after the 10.4.8 
update. The 10.4.8 obervation matches with what people are discussing 
here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=636696.

In order to find a solution, I googled a bit and stumbled about this: 
http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/10/8065/. It basically says:

Trash 
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist 
and ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist. Then shut 
down, reset the PMU, reboot and there you go (afterwards, you'll have to 
reset your power management preferences of course). And in fact, when I 
tried this trick in November, it totally fixed my issue! I kept watching 
the logs and my computer did never wake up randomly again ever since 
then ... up until yesterday.

Accordingly, it seems like the above fix is a temporary one and the 
problem can come back - the only question is: What causes it to come 
back? I tried to remember if I did something special the day it 
re-occured and in fact the only thing was that I used a Western Digital 
Passport external USB hard drive that I had never used with this 
computer before. Could this be the reason for the new random wake 
issues? Highly speculative, but entirely possible that the usage of 
certain USB devices has a negative impact on power management settings 
stored in the PMU. Who knows.

So, after this long story, my question is: Has anyone else seen this as 
well and probably a more conclusive idea what's going on? As everybody 
seems to agree, 10.4.8. introduced it and I sure hope 10.4.9. will 
permanently fix it. Until then, although the temporary fix mentioned 
above actually helps, I've decided to rather shut down my MBP, 
especially before moving it around in my backpack. A computer waking up 
in there without proper ventilation is probably not too good an idea, 
even though it would more than likely enter sleep mode again by itself 
after a minute...

Greetings,
Nils