So I've been tackling some issues with one of my machines over the last couple of weeks. It hasn't been going to sleep after ten minutes of inactivity, like it's told too.
I hate troubleshooting these sorts of issues as there are so many things that can cause it and it is difficult to track down what's making the machine think it's still in use. A few months ago it was some junkware that Amelia wanted installed that added extra silly faces and the like to Windows Live Messenger, this thing started a process under every user regardless of if Messenger was even running, or setup on their account.
That was promptly thrown in the bin where it belongs.
This time it was a little bit more of a problem. There were no services or applications running that shouldn't of been the only hardware recently installed was a QuickCam Pro 4000, which was installed a couple of weeks prior to the issue appearing. Yes the Reliability and Performance Monitor rocks, it is good seeing when changes to a system had been made.
I did however have one clue. The system would sleep on a fresh boot if nobody had logged on. So that narrowed it down to something happening on the desktop. Daemon Tools is the only non-Microsoft application I've got loading upon login. Then it dawned on me, Battlefield 2 was recently installed, and to save inserting the disc every time I used an image of it, which was being loaded by Daemon Tools from the file server, where all that stuff is stored.
I unmounted the image and sure enough the system began to idle to sleep again.
Failing to see how Daemon Tools itself could be causing the issue, I opened a picture stored on the server, and while that was open the system again wouldn't idle to sleep.
So it seems, if something is open over the network the machine won't idle to sleep. So if you've got sleeping troubles, that's something worth taking a look at. Annoying.