X31 backlight turns off annoyingly after a few seconds

Weird problem with my x31.  Normally, everything is...well...normal.
But every once in a while, the LCD backlight will turn off after 3-10 seconds of keyboard/mouse inactivity.  As long as I keep typing, the light will stay on.  But if I pause to think, the backlight goes off and the only way to bring it back on is to hit F3 to "darken the screen" and then move the mouse around or hit a key.
It's like there's some sort of extreme power saving mode going on in the system.
It happens even at the boot screen or the BIOS editor...so this is some bit of hardware that has gotten confused.  After a couple of hours, it goes away...but the system isn't much use when it's happening.
When the backlight is off, the LCD is still painting a picture -- I just need to shoot a powerful flashlight at the screen and all the pixels are being properly controlled.  There's just no illumination.
Ideas?  Is there some sort of software diagnostic that would knock some sense back into the backlight controller?

No, the backlight is the color it should be.
I turned off the power-saving mode for "auto-dim" -- but that is calibrated in minutes, and this is happening in seconds (not only that, but its erratic...sometimes 1 second, sometimes 10).
Just for fun I downloaded the latest version of the Power Management stuff (which was just updated a week ago) and ran a whole series of PCDoctor diagnostics on the hardware.  Problem is gone for now...we'll see if that actually was the solution.

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