Display not activating

Question

Last night I grabbed my MBP and ran up to the neighbors to work on some Math Problems. I was telling him how much I loved my Mac and how it hasn't crashed or had any problems (slight lie) since I had it. I opened up the lid and nothing. The system was on, the lights were on, the keyboard was active but I could not get the screen to go from black to viewable.
Normally I press the space bar when this happens and it comes on but last night nothing worked. I could hit wrong keys and the sound card would sound out so I know it was on. I ended up having to do a hard reset, at which point when it came back up it sat for 10 minutes trying to reboot and never did. I had to do a second hard boot to finally get it going again. Wasn't a good impression for someone that is about to buy a new computer and was asking what I thought about my new Mac.
Any ideas what would have caused this? Here are the things that might have effected it.
1) the computer was asleep on my desk when I shut the lid and left.
2) It had power plugged in before I shut it
3) When I opened it it was running off battery power
Thanks,
glenn

Answer 1

This sometimes happens if you somehow manage to put your Mac asleep while the screen is off, but the system's running. Stupid bug, though not really serious (you should always save your data before putting computer to sleep).
For example: Mac has turned the screen off because you've left it unattended for some time. You then close the lid and put it asleep. When the machine wakes up, it remembers having the screen off before going to sleep - so it starts up with the screen off, but "forgets" to turn it on again. It happend to me three times. I'm much more careful now.
If it happens, shut it down (somehow), reset power management (unplugg from the AC adapter, remove battery and hold POWER button for ten seconds) and it shut work fine without any more reboots.
MBP 1,8GHz, 2GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.10)   Cool and quiet first gen MBP - A MIRACLE!