I'm completely stumped by this. My simple use case is that when I'm in bed, I use a cordless mouse to browse the web, watch videos, etc. - the monitor is across the room. When I'm going to sleep, I want to shut the monitor off. I also want to be able to turn it back on in the morning. I just want to turn the monitor off and on using only the mouse.

I thought of creating a power setting that turned the monitor off asap (the shortest amount of time is one minute; that's fine). I have one that does this. It worked great for almost a year on my old XP machine, and for about four months on my new Windows 7 laptop (which I essentially use as a desktop). All of a sudden a couple weeks ago, it just stopped working - my monitor won't turn off on its own anymore. Here are the settings:

I tried other options. Based on the advice here I tried nircmd. This seemed great. I created a shortcut with the command line:

"C:\Program Files\nircmd\nircmd.exe" cmdwait 1000 monitor off

I click this, and in one second the monitor goes off. However about five seconds later it turns back on, and I've been extra careful to make sure the mouse isn't moving.

I have no idea what's going on. Based on both of these things, my only guess is that something could be running in the background which somehow makes the computer think it's in use. I've tried killing as many programs as possible but I still get the same behavior. Any advice? I'm mainly curious about how to debug, but am open to other suggestions about turning the monitor off and on with just the mouse as well.