Nothing but the mouse and a few task bar popup windows work after resu

In a nutshell, Windows Explorer (and most but not all of the GUI) hangs/freezes on this system after it resumes from a standby state.

I have just installed Windows 7 (64 bit) on a PC that had been running XP (32 bit). As such, it is a clean install of Windows 7 onto a new SSD bought for that purpose.

All current critical updates are installed.
All optional hardware updates are installed.

The BIOS, motherboard drivers and video card drivers are the latest available as of 24 hours ago.

Here are some of the specifics for the hardware installed:
System Model EP45-UD3R (rev 1.0)
System Type x64-based PC
Processor Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q9400 @ 2.66GHz, 2133 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date Award Software International, Inc. F12, 1/25/2010
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB
CD-ROM Optiarc DVD RW AD-7260S ATA
SSD OCZSSD2-1VTXLE100G
DeviceDisplay ATI Radeon HD 3600 Series (3650, 1GB)
RealTek Audio & Ethernet is provided by the motherboard.

Under XP, the system will hibernate and/or standby and resume without problem.
Under Windows 7, the machine is setup for hybrid sleep and it will "go to sleep" (power down to S3 state) OK but when it reawakens, it will not do anything useful. Some of the taskbar icons (like the action center) will produce information-only popup windows but none of the other toolbar icons (like the "pearl" or Internet Explorer) cause anything to happen other than a spinning cursor.
If I have the task manager open and showing the Performance-tab strip charts when the system is put to sleep, when the system is reawaken, it will still appear and the strip charts will still run until I start clicking around on things with the mouse, at which point the strip charts will freeze. If I have a window open when the system goes into the S3 state, it will still be open when the system resumes from S3 and I can use the scroll bars for the window to move the contents around without problem but if there are controls or links in the window and I click on them, they will not respond other than to cause a "busy" cursor to start being displayed.

If the cursor is left to spin long enough (3 or 4 minutes), the screen will go black and only the cursor arrow will be left. A reboot of the PC at this point will retrieve the hibernation (S4) settings saved when the PC was put to "sleep" and after those settings are loaded the machine will be fully functional and in the same state it was in when it was put to sleep.

At this point, no other software than what comes on the Windows 7 installation DVD and from Microsoft update is installed on the machine. Subsequent addition of the ATI/RealTek/Intel drivers do not help this problem (though they do get the display and sound working better).

I've tried the extremes of the sleep-related power settings for the PCI-bus, processor and USB and those did not make any difference. Standby-only (no hybrid) works the same except the resume after reboot does not work.

I have run the Windows 7 provided extended memory diagnosis for a half-dozen cycles and those did not find any problems. The Windows 7 60-second diagnostic does not find any problem.

I have tried installing the 32-bit version of Windows 7 and it too has this same behavior. The problem will occur if the the USB is free of all devices.

The system also has a SATA HDD and both the SSD(Win7 OS) and HDD(XP OS) are configured as IDE (as opposed to AHCI) devices in the BIOS so that I can still boot/run XP until I get this Win7 silliness sorted out. I have installed Win7 several times now (I'm beginning to get the MS key memorized) with the HDD unplugged from the system and the hang still occurs. It will also occur if the CD/DVD drive is missing from the system.

I found this discussion and setup to get a trace of what was happening when the system resumed from standby and everything went according to the script (Command used = xbootmgr -trace standby -traceFlags BASE+CSWITCH+DRIVERS+POWER -resultPath C:\TEMP) until the system actually resumed running after S3 and a window popped up that said "Changing power state..." which lingered for about 4 minutes until I decided that the power state was never going to change (the network status icon in the taskbar area almost immediately gets/keeps a red X over it which is another symptom of this standby-hang state) and I pressed the reboot button. The system then restarted from the hibernation settings and the xboot log file ricked up from there and showed a normal completion of the process.

What else might I do to diagnose & fix this problem?

Thanks in advance,
Warren

I had a second identical SSD installed in another computer here. In this other computer (with an ABIT motherboard) this second SSD did not exhibit this problem. I tried moving the second SSD to the problem system and it behaved just like the first SSD; it too would hang when the system restarted from standby. That would seem to say that the problem is probably not a defective SSD. The Gigabyte motherboard in the problem system, in addition to the six SATA ports hanging off the Intel ICH10R south bridge, also has two SATA ports hanging off a “Gigabyte SATA 2 chip” and I finally got around to trying the SSD off one of those two ports and I’m happy to report that it does not experience this problem when run in this manner. I have a solution that I can live with.