I have Vista on my Laptop and have set to to sleep on closure but not to
need a password for reopening, I just press the power button to wake it up.

I do not know if Ubuntu allows you to set this up in Preferences/Power
Management

Is it safe to assume you have tried a quick push of the
power button/any-key or swipe on the mousepad to bring the screen
back? If so, what if you try "control+alt+F3". Do you see a login
prompt? If yes there, it is likely we can get you back into your
system without having to shut down. Also, you can set up the
preferences on screen close like Ian suggested, but note that you also
need to disable the screensaver which is a separate menu option in
system -> preferences. However, on one of my laptops, the disabling
the screensaver refuses to persist across boots.

Don't forget when forcing a reboot, it is safer to hold down your
"alt" key while slowly pressing, in
sequence,"Printscreen/sysrq,R,E,I,S,U,B". You can search this list or
the web/wikipedia for more info on that series of comands if you are
not familiar with it.

Any-key, swiping the mouse pad, mouse clicks, control+alt+F3 don't work.

Under Power Management, I have it set to suspend when the lid is closed.
Screen saver is currently off per your suggestion, but it makes no difference.

When opening the lid after waiting for it to suspend (as indicated by the power
LED going from solid to blinking) the screen remains blank and now of the
"normal" things makes it fully wake. If I hit the keys to dim or brighten the
screen, I get text "[ 3013.894058] ACPI: Failed to switch the brightness" - even
though it DID "switch the brightness". After this pressing the Enter key lets
me login and takes me to the command line.

If I set it to blank the screen instead of suspend, it recovers when the lid
is opened. I haven't tested to see what will happen if I leave it closed long
enough to suspend due to inactivity.

This is the help advice in Ubuntu

My computer does not suspend or hibernate correctly

* Working with Hardware Devices
* Suspending and hibernating your computer

Some computers are unable to suspend or hibernate correctly with Ubuntu.
If this is the case for your computer, you may notice some of the
following symptoms:

*


The computer does not turn off after you click to
hibernate it.

*

When you turn the computer on after hibernating it, your
previously open programs are not restored.

*

The computer will not wake up after you have suspended it.

*

Certain programs or hardware devices stop working
correctly after resuming from hibernation or waking-up from being suspended.


If you suffer from any of these problems, you should report a bug to
Launchpad. The problems will hopefully be fixed in a subsequent version
of Ubuntu.

If your hardware does not work properly after suspending or hibernating
your computer, restart your computer and it should return to normal. If
a program does not work properly, try closing the program and then
starting it again.


You should shut open programs down before closing the lid

Also you did not read on my advice that you should press the Power
Button to wake it up because key do not work.

Surprisingly, my iBuddie laptop hibernates and returns pretty well. It does
need a long (2 second) press on the power button to resume and if there are
programmes running it won't hibernate.

If hibernation works on this nearly 10 year old machine it ought to work
everywhere!

Ok, we'll assume you've tried the old power button also like Ian
mentioned? And Someone below suggested a longer push of the power
button to wake up.

The next things to check, (1) how big is your "swap" space? It needs
to be at least as big as your physical RAM for suspend to work
properly, but probably 1.5 times that size to be sure. (2) you need
to check and make sure swap is mounted. Open a terminal and type
"swapon -s". The return from that command should list the partition
and size of swap if it is mounted properly.

The errors you describe after trying to push a brightness key may
suggest an additional error, but I'm not sure if that could be a swap
issue or something else.