Intermittent issue going to sleep

I'm running Win7 HP and for the most part, everything works great. I can go in and out of sleep generally without much problem.

Occasionally, however, when I put the computer to sleep the monitor shuts off like normal, but instead of seeing the HDD light go crazy as it writes RAM to the disk, it just sits there. It can go on for 5-10 minutes of doing nothing. Then finally it decides to finish what it started, writes RAM to disk, and then goes to sleep. Usually after this happens if I wake it up and try to do something like install an update with Windows Update, it will just hang. I'm forced to log out and shut down, or sometimes it won't ever shut down (and just sits at the "Shutting down..." screen) and I'm forced to do a hard power cycle.

I'm not generally running any applications when I put it to sleep. This never happened when I was running Vista HP on the same computer. Most topics I've found deal with the computer waking up when it's not supposed to or it never sleeps, and none of these accurately describe my problem. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

That sounds like drivers issues. Type sigverify into the start menu, press enter, and then choose start. Any drivers that appear are unsigned and could cause problems. The log is in the All Users Public folder or in the Documents subfolder. Try updating all your drivers with the guide in my sig.

Oops, my mistake. I should've mentioned that I'm running x64, and as such all of my drivers are signed (although I did just verify with that application). Windows Update also shows no outdated drivers.

Try updating the chipset and BIOS. Also, check the BIOS for differing power states - S1 or S3.