How do I get the power manager settings to take hold? And stay that way?

Question

I want to have my computer awake while on the battery and while I'm driving my car.  To reduce distraction, I want to have the lid closed.
In order to make this mode easy to get to, I created a new power plan that has the "lid-closed" event result in "do nothing".  Sometimes, this works.  Sometimes, the computer goes to sleep.  It is exceedingly annoying when the computer goes to sleep because I will get to my destination 45 minutes later and find that the computer didn't do what I wanted.
I've also noticed that the setting for "do nothing" sometimes bleeds over to other power plans.  This is also a problem because, under ordinary situations, I would like my computer to behave normally.
Here's a summary of the situation:
1. I've disabled the "apply the settings to all power plans" button.
2. I've created a new power plan called "Logging" that should stay awake when the lid is closed.  This power plan will sleep after 65 minutes and hibernate 10 minutes after that (on battery).
3. This plan stays awake sometimes, but not other times.  At this instant, sitting in my living room, it refuses to stay awake.  Oops, just tried it and now it works (a little consistency here would be nice). 
4. As a case example, this morning the computer behaved as expected: I arrived at my destination and it was still away and logging.  This afternoon, I woke it up and started logging, closed the lid, and drove off.  Upon reaching my destination, I discovered that the computer went to sleep as soon as the lid was closed.
5.  The program I'm running logs data points.  When the computer sleeps, data points don't get logged.  Therefore, I know the computer is sleeping because, after a long logging session (45 minutes), there will only be a few seconds of data points (which correspond to the amount of time it takes to close the lid).  If the computer goes to sleep after 10 minutes or 30 minutes, there would be many more data points.
6. When the computer hibernates or sleeps, it seems to remove whatever change I last put into the plan.  Even so, the plan still "says" that the change is there.
Ultimately, the difficulty here is that I can't predict what the computer is going to do.  If I could, then I could adjust my use pattern.

Answer 1

Try this:
Go into Power Manager, choose the Logging profile.
Go into Windows' Power Options, choose a different profile, then switch back to the Logging profile.
See if this clears any contradiction between the two.
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