Freezing/Startup issue

Question

I've been dealing with this all weekend and wasted my whole weekend I guess. Here's the story:
It all started when I updated iTunes. Never had a problem before that. I wouldn't have even updated it because I'm usually paranoid about updates anyway for this very ******* reason, go figure. I did it for some random girl who came up to me in school and asked if she could activate her iPhone on my computer. I'm always so nice and it always bites me in the *** big time and I always have to pay for it because no one else ever wants to ever take any ******* responsibility or even be polite.
Anyway so I updated iTunes and my computer started freezing upon waking from sleep... totally freezing, nothing to do, had to hard restart each time. Then it started saying that I had to restart my computer when I restarted it instead of starting up... and then eventually one morning it just kept doing that and I couldn't get it to start at all.
Took it to the Genius Bar, where a nice girl ran diagnostics and worked on it for about 45 minutes, inconclusively. She said "IF it's software, this, IF it's hardware, this." Great. Kernal issue was the most she could make out, due to what, she couldn't tell. Told me to go to TekServe.
So to TekServe I went, he told me the same thing, told me I had to pay them some money to either fix the software problem by erasing my hard drive and reinstalling my OS, or pay them way more to send it out to fix the hardware (even more than the girl at Genius Bar said they'd do it for). Which is absolutely ridiculous, because I could do the former myself, I just needed to know WHAT the problem was. I asked him if there was or wasn't a way for him to be able to tell absolutely if the problem was with the hard- or software, so I don't just have to ******* guess and spend like $500. So he "found out" for me and had me wait a few minutes. Came back and said he tried some **** and it was definitely software. Definitely? DEFINITELY. Okay great.
So I went home and did the erase and install myself.
And later was very unhappy to find that I am still experiencing issues reawakening from sleep. Set the computer to not go to sleep when idle, just the display, which fixes the problem until I close my computer. That's it though. Still not happy.
Also the COMPUTER wakes back up, it's the DISPLAY only that doesn't now, I didn't mention, since I did the erase and install. Or I'm not sure because when I try some keyboard shortcuts they don't seem to work, but the keyboard had lit back up and the fan is whirring, stuff like that. So who knows. I certainly don't.
Just tried resetting the SMC too. I don't know if that WOULD make a difference after the erase and install, but I tried it anyway. Don't yet know if it helped. I still want to post this for advice just in case, rather sooner than later.
Thank you very much, any tips you could give me will be extremely appreciated, obviously. I was yelling at all these people at like 2am when I realized they all ****** me over. I'm very upset.
Thanks.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1337981&start=135&tstart=0

Answer 1

Resetting the SMC sounds like a pretty good idea. If the problem recurs, try booting in safe mode shift key down at startup).
If you can reproduce the issue with a reset SMC, a freshly erased and installed drive, and no third-party software loaded, then it certainly is hardware or an OS bug, no matter what anybody told you.