I've been using Ubuntu for about five years now, and I still can't make it suspend when I want to. It's quite irritating that I can program up a storm, hack the machine in numerous other ways, and yet, and yet when I try to make it suspend or debug suspend, I fail miserably.

I need help.

Where do I begin to find the problem? What do I do to fix it? I'm placing a bounty on this, because I've literally lost hours of my life to this problem, and leaving my computer on ALL the time is terrible.

The symptoms:

• Pressing suspend brings my computer to a state where it has a blinking cursor, the fans are running, it seems that the HD has turned off (I think), and I can't do anything to bring it back from this state (short of a hard reboot).
• Possibly related: My fans stay on even after a shutdown, and even then, I have to press the power button for five seconds before I can start it up again.
• I don't know what logs to look at to debug the problem, and I imagine they'd get nuked on reboot anyway.

Please, please help. This drives me completely nuts, and I've been living with it for over a year.