monitor will not wake up

For the last month, my monitor will go into a low power state from which it does not recover. I often need to completely power down both the monitor and the computer for the monitor to come back to "life". This initially occurred when the computer went to sleep, so I disabled all the sleep/monitor off options and it still would occur. The computer would be running normally, but the monitor would be off with a faint orange light on the power button. Before this began, it would have a stronger orange signal when "asleep" and a green signal when operating normally.

I have fixed the problem by running a screen saver, but it's the middle of summer and the computer creates a pretty hot environment. Unfortunately, the problem also occurs when I manually put the computer to sleep, shut off the monitor, and occasionally when I power down the whole system. I recently ran a number of windows upgrades, including upgrading my video card driver, so I went back to the old driver, and it still occurs. Unfortunately, there were about 50 windows updates and I don't see a restore point listed for before they were installed. I assume I can uninstall each one manually, but that will be a real pain. Any thoughts on to what kind of update could do this besides a video card update?

Monitor is an Acer 2216w. The heat I was referring to was from the computer, not the monitor.

Check bios settings to motherboard is enabled for S3 sleep. Also that mouse will wake it up. I've done updates where these setting changed.