Suspend on fedora 16

I believe that I could suspend my Dell E6410 when it was running Fedora 15. I'm not sure what power state I was using, but I could close the lid and it would power down. When I opened the lid and pressed a key on the keyboard, it would come back to state that I left my session in. I didn't have to think about whether the laptop was sleeping or suspending or hibernating. It just worked without any effort on my part.

Now I'm running Fedora 16 and when I try to suspend, it wakes up enough to light up the bluetooth, wifi, and hard disk icons, showing activity, but the screen stays dark. When I press a key on the keyboard, the screen switches to a slightly lighter shade of gray for a few seconds before it switches back down to darker gray. The keyboard is active, because I can switch in and out of caps lock mode. But attempts to switch to a console with ctrl-F2 cause no change. Likewise with ctrl-alt-del or ctrl-alt-backspace. Or any other key combination I can think of. The only way out of this state is to hold the power button for 7 seconds or so until it powers off. Then power back on.

I've tried hibernating instead of suspending, but that fails during the wake up process and then does a fresh reboot. I suppose that optimizes a few steps of the suspend procedure, but both are non-optimal.

/etc/pm/sleep.d

I've tried following the instructions on this blog with no effect: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=265588

kernel boot option acpi=off

This page looks hopeful, but I haven't tried fiddling my grub.conf yet: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/laptop/

disabling suspend in policy kit

And I'd rather not have to resort to this page that tells me how to just turn off suspend because it is hopeless: http://blog.anttix.org/2011/11/disabling-suspend-and-hibernate-on-fedora-16/#more-248