Comment 10 for bug 114595

If you are using gnome-power-manager, try launching it with
$ gnome-power-manager --no-daemon --verbose
and look for the lid events from that end. What could be happening, like in my case, is the lid open event never gets reported by acpid or hal thus g-p-m always thinks the lid is closed. Therefore, when a subsequent 'Lid Closed' event occurs through acpid/hal, it gets ignored by g-p-m since gpm-button.c ignores duplicate lid events. What I did, is i patched gpm-button.c to allow for duplicate lid events (temporary fix: probably not a good Idea). This fix should be in hal/acpid to emit a 'Lid Open' event. Or, gnome-power-manager should reset the Lid state once we know it is unmistakably open (e.g keyboard/mouse activity).