Is Constant Online Connectivity Affecting Sleep and Shut Down Issues?

I spent last week away from the office in technical rehearsals for Shadow of the Raven: Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. I was using both the Asus R2H and the Lenovo ThinkPad X61 during my work depending on tasks. As we have a wireless network in the our new theatre space it makes communicating back to the office and with others via email and other methods work very well.

But there are times where I’m in note taking mode where I will flip off all the radios on a device to help squeeze a bit more battery life out of either device. While doing this last week I noticed what may, or may not be, a trend.

One of the issues with Vista that many have talked about is returning from hibernation or sleep. I’ve seen those myself and had to do a cold reboot to correct the problem on numerous occasions. I’ve applied all the various patches that Microsoft released, and on the R2H, I have Vista SP1 running. The frequency of the problem has diminished with those patches and the SP1 beta applied but the issue still does manifest itself occasionally.

Further, I noticed that the issue seemed to only occur when I had shut off the WiFi and/or BlueTooth radios. It was a busy week and I didn’t have time to do any real testing of my observations, but after we got the show open, I’ve tested this a bit, and I seem only to have a problem if I turn off the radios before putting either unit to sleep. Leaving the radios on and the units will go to sleep and return without issue. Turning them off and the units will hang, though not every time. If I do complete shutdown with the radios off, then reboot, then attempt to go into sleep mode, there is no issue whatsoever.

I do not know this to be true, and certainly someone smarter than I might  knock a hole in this theory, but my speculation is that some application or process may be doing something in the background requiring online communication when the radios are shut down, thus leading to the system hanging, when it attempts to go to sleep. 

Anyone else seeing this or have any evidence that might be contrary to my speculation?