powertop breaks lock screen, mouse, keyboard

[whitis]

After installing and running powertop (and powerstat), system was broken multiple times:
   - mouse became unusable because it was put to sleep without my consent. LED turns off. Had to press button to wake up mouse but it would go to sleep very shortly thereafter. Was able to issue a command to turn mouse power one.
   - can't recover from lock screen. It acts as if someone is continually typing a carriage return. It keeps redisplaying a message to the effect of "Authentication Failed". No keys you type on keyboard show up as dots in the password field. Can't use on-screen keyboard. Unplugged all USB devices. Still persists. I was able to SSH in from another computer the second time and after killing gsd-keyboard a couple times was able to regain control but only because it crashed gnome-shell and logged me out. First time I think I rebooted. System behaved ok for 5 days and then recurred. System had been stable for months before installing powertop.

I suspect that the keyboard stack randomly gets screwed up coming out of unauthorized auto suspend.

I believe I had run powertop and powertop --calibrate before the problems started.

mouse and keyboard had been unplugged to reset multiple times.

system is a desktop. Was actually looking for something that could tell me how much power was being consumed.

powertop was observed to be running, without my consent, when I logged on by SSH. The documentation I had seen said you needed to manually add powertop to startup scripts which I certainly did not do.

Involuntary logout can lead to data loss. I was very lucky this time that I had apparently saved shortly before loss of control.

uninstalled powertop.

powertop:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 2.9-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
     2.9-0ubuntu1 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/main amd64 Packages

Some info that may be of interest to others encountering the problem, for workaround, clean up, etc.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/80638/how-to-disable-auto-power-off-of-usb-devices-like-usb-mouse

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: powertop (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.3.0-46.38~18.04.1-generic 5.3.18
Uname: Linux 5.3.0-46-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.14
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Sat Apr 25 10:26:27 2020
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-05-02 (358 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20190210)
SourcePackage: powertop
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)