X201 - Random standby, blank/bright screen and left side USB issue

Question

I have a bunch of issues with my X201 that slowly developed over the past months. The motherboard had been replaced once due to USB/standby issues and worked fine for a few months, but now it seems to be returning again.
I'm not sure if this is again a motherboard issue or something else altogether. In rough sequence of when the faults started appearing.
Initial symptoms: the left side yellow USB ports will stop working after returning from standby/hibernation. Windows 7 gives a USB device error and basically everything connected to that same USB controller won't work. Sometimes it recovers by itself after  a few more standby/wake cycles, sometimes if I disable/enable the USB controller in Device Manager but often nothing works except a shutdown and cold boot.
Then the screen started going extra bright or more accurate high gamma white-out when returning from standby. Everything becomes very whitish/bright but slowly will settle down to normal within 30 seconds or so.
I could live with all these niggling small issues, but recently my X201 started going crazy with random drops into STANDBY. I know there is a thread about random shutdown but that isn't the issue here.
Just out of the blue, connected to power with 100% battery, the X201 will go into standby. Sometimes it will wake almost immediately by itself, then go back into standby again. Other times, I have to hit the Fn button to wake it, but frequently it will just go right back to standby again. The number of times this happen before it stabilized again is random. Reboot may or may not fix it the issue. Like a hiccup, it starts without reason and stops without reason, but makes it extremely annoying and impossible to work when it does.
The worst part is that often when returning from standby, the screen may go blank, even the backlight is off. Sometimes this happen immediately on return, but sometimes it takes a few seconds before the screen dies. During the blank screen, the system is responsive. I could type my login password blind and see hard disk activity and hear the login music.
According to the Windows event log, this appears to be triggered by some phantom power button or Lid close event.
Would anybody have a conclusive idea of what might be the root cause of these problems?
I can't really have a downtime without my laptop for days sending it for repairs and hope to be able to isolate the part so that I can just call in on parts warranty and get it fixed in a few hours.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem with my X201 after hibernation due to no AC power and battery depletion.
I was loathe to replace the motherboard.
Then one day I tried this. Went into BIOS. Disabled, then enabled various  ports under supervisor password control. (I heard don't use extended password which encrypts. use the simple 8 character one).
I had disabled the usb card reader all usb ports. I had taken off the hard drive password I had put on earlier.
Then after a power off cycle.  I enabled the usb card reader and all the usb ports again.
Then like some miracle windows detected the SD card reader and re-installed the usb root hub drivers at the same time. For some reason it seems the SD card reader is tied to the usb root hub. Maybe it's already part of it already.
Then all the ports were working again. I was so relieved that I didn' have to call Lenovo to replace my MB. I didn't even have to update by flashing the BIOS.
It's all ok now. I like the X201 and the keyboard. From what i've seen of the X220 they've abandoned the traditional 90's style keyboard this time. I should have bought an extra X201 when Lenovo put it on special pricing bakc in 2011. Now they are completely gone from Lenovo and the prices on the major resellers of Lenovo are way too high for all the Lenovo notebooks too.