How do I revive a comatose MacBook Pro?

Question

A little over a week ago, my son closed my wife's MacBook Pro (early 2008 model) - which already had a low battery - too quickly. As has happened before, it went into deep sleep mode, but nothing I did could wake it up.
Then I remembered to let the battery run down all the way. I did so, then plugged it back in and - just before midnight that night - it came out of sleep mode for about a half-hour. Thinking things were fine, I closed it.
In the morning, it was deep sleeping again. Nothing could rouse it, so I took it to the Apple Store. The Genius reset the PRAM and SMC, and at that point it looked like we were back in business. I put it in my bag and carried it home.
But when I opened it at home - same thing: dead to the world. It's been like that several days now.
Does anyone have any tips for reviving a comatose MacBook Pro besides the steps I've already taken? The Genius said it's in fine shape, no hardware issues.
Thanks for any help any of you can offer.

Answer 1

Create a new user with Admin privileges, and then delete your current user ID.  That will take out anything you installed, outside of the operating system. For completeness, I would then bring up Disk Utility and erase free space.
Alternatively, you could boot into Lion recovery mode (command and R keys held down while booting), bring up Disk Utility, erase the hard drive (recommend writing zero's to the hard drive, as this also resets the hard drive bad block table), then reinstall Lion. That's as clean as it gets. If you have any other software to load from backup, do that. Done!