MacBook Pro won't sleep, even in safe boot

Question

Hey gang,
I can't figure out what to do with this problem. I recently did an archive & install of 10.5 on my 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo, and then used software update to get to 10.5.2.
Ever since doing that, my MacBook Pro will not sleep on its own anymore. It will sleep the display, but it won't sleep the system. (I can close the lid and it will sleep. I can also choose "Sleep" from the Apple Menu, and it will sleep. It just won't sleep on its own.)
At first I thought it might be Time Machine that was preventing it from sleeping, but I turned off Time Machine and the problem persisted. I tried creating a new user, and the problem persisted. In fact, I EVEN BOOTED IN SAFE MODE AND THE PROBLEM PERSISTED!
I went through every single step outlined on this page (yes, every single step), and the problem still persisted: http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20070129234938244
Does anybody have any ideas what I can do at this point? I'm pulling out my hair over here....
Thanks!
Scott

Answer 1

I see you've done your homework. I have this no auto-sleep problem on my Mac pro and none of those things worked for me either but I thought you should give them a shot.
I made a little sleep program of my own. You are welcome to try it. It's a very simple shell script that checks system idle time and if it's bigger than the sleep timer you set in system preferences it puts your computer to sleep. It will work so long as you can manually put your computer to sleep from the apple menu.
You'll also need to create a launch daemon to periodically run the script.
here are the steps to do it.
1. copy and paste the following into TextEdit.
#!/bin/bash
idl=$"`ioreg -c IOHIDSystem | awk '/HIDIdleTime/ {print int($NF/1000000000); exit}'`"
sleeptimer=$"`defaults read /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement "Custom Profile" | grep "System Sleep Timer" | awk '{print $5}' | sed -e 's/;//g'`"
st=`expr $sleeptimer \* 60 `
if \[ $idl -gt $st \]; then
shutdown -s now
fi
2. Format it as *plain text* (shiftcommandT in TextEdit) and save it as sleep.sh (don't use the .txt extension) at the top level of your hard drive.
3. make it unix executable by entering the following command in terminal.
*chmod 755 /sleep.sh*
4. Download and install [Lingon|http://lingon.sourceforge.net>.
5. Open Lingon and create a new *Users Daemon*
Call it,say, com.sleep.launchd (the name is not important)
On line 2. enter /sleep.sh
and in section 3 set it to run every 30 seconds.
Click save (you'll have to enter your admin password).
6. Restart.
That's it. Once this is done you can forget about it. The sleep settings are still controlled from system preferences. The sleep agent will work with every user and even over the login window.
To uninstall it, open Lingon, select the launch daemon you made and uncheck the box "Enabled" in the upper right corner. save and restart.