I’ve had problems over and over again when I wake my PowerBook from sleep when on the road. Occasionally it shows the spinning pizza cursor but never the login / password window and I have to restart the machine. If I’m lucky, I can ssh to the box and kill my processes, but that only works if I went to sleep in a mode that does DHCP on the built-in ethernet interface.

Apple has released an update today that addresses this problem (so they claim):

• Resolves an issue in which the display could sometimes remain dark when waking from display sleep (the mouse pointer might appear, but normal function could not be restored) if using Screen Saver password on a portable computer.

If this truly fixes the problem — it will be a happy day indeed. This has been one of my biggest beefs with the otherwise fantastic little (Rev A) machine.

Update 2005.09.29: Someone else has potentially figured this problem out. It might lie with the lookupd process. unlockupd is a program (and daemon) that hangs out looking for a lookupd lockup and restarts it. Link.