Comment 3 for bug 131628

my laptop has the same phenomena with yours, andrew, I can type my password and log in so I could see faintly that the screen changes a bit, then I know on top it's gnome-terminal. I type "sudo reboot", then the laptop reboots. After restarted, it becomes normal.
it only goes wrong when I use suspend (suspend to ram, standby) but not hibernate, the hibernate option works fine, at least I don't find anything wrong, yet.