Sleeping light & keyboad lights failure

Dear all,
I read the posts archived in these forums on the following issue but as there was no real guidance coming forward I thought to restate the issue I'm facing in case there is fresh knowledge on it.
A couple of weeks ago, the sleep light on my powerbook G4 started to come on all the time. I didn't noticed it until tonight, but it seems that when this occurs the backlit keyboard is also non-functional. This doesn't happen all the time, but now most of the time.
A friend told me that this was an indication of an issue with the USB ports, which would be grave because they are linked directly to the logic board.
I'm not sure if it is related or not, but I had some relatively serious problems with the directory of my hard drive (sibling link failures). I spent a couple of days cloning and then fixing the problems with Diskwarrior and Disk Utility. It appears the directory is fine now (though I did have to do an archive and install and could, if necessary, clone the good drive and wipe the original drive and start completely afresh). The problem, however, of the sleep light has not gone away. My friend had suggested that an erase and reinstall might cure the issue.
Can anyone give any practical advice on this issue? I cannot afford to lose my logic board, especially given that I live in Egypt where a new logic board would be hard to find and may not be able to be fitted.
Should I worry? Does this symptom mean that my logic board is on the edge of the abyss?
Thanks in advance for any guidance.
Dr Ian Douglas
powerbook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   1.2GB RAM 1.5Ghz

Hey All,
I finally decided to check here, as none of the fixes I attempted appeared to be working.
If it is an L-Board problem, them I'm in deep doo.
I'm currently in Panama, and thought that it might be a problem with some sort of variance in the power cycle here, as my first couple of days here, the PowerBook refused to charge fully.
It would keep at a constant level, and only draw power when it dropped below.
None of the various locations I tried provided relief, until recently, and now P]power's fine and at 100%.
Except I noticed the flashing 'sleep light' last night, tried checking around.
No fixes, and in the last several hours, I just noticed the 'no backlit-keyboard' issue (as it got darker, and it didn't come on).
There's a MacStore (authorized reseller type), I'll have to try them and see if they can do anything, as my AC contract is still valid.
Crikey, this *****.

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