Comment 7 for bug 523072

I've done some debugging of this issue. This seems to be a poor interaction between lid closure and suspend. If you run pm-suspend (or send the dbus signal the gnome-power-manager uses when it detects a lid closure), my laptop resumes fine both by using the power button and by closing and opening the lid. However, if the suspend is initiated through a lid closure the backlight fails to come back on resume.