My MacBook Pro screen turns off when I open the lid!

Try Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)

I have the same issue with my 17" MBP it only happens when Power adaptor is attached. I only have one user set up on mine. what I did notice was after I open the lid I get a flash of video for a second and then black however if you shine a flashlight through the mac logo on the front you can see the screen is actually on just the backlight is off. you can even seen the mouse moving and programs opening and closing.

I have the exact same issue as the original post. No video flash or anything like bluejay81 posted. I also have two accounts on my MBP. One for work and one for fun. My fun account is the only one that does this.

There was one instance yesterday where I couldn't get it to turn on at all anymore. I tried the usual brightness button trick and closed, waited, reopened and nothing happened. I had to hold down the power button to force it to turn off and rebooted.

I have a tendency to turn off my monitor by hitting shift-ctrl-eject. I think it might be an issue with that where if it goes to sleep with the monitor turned off this way it gets confused? I don't know... I do this too with my other account.

One more thing that I'm considering is that I have the electric sheep screen saver. I use this with the other account too, but maybe the settings are different. Not sure if this would get whiped with ~/Library/Preferences folder though. I'll try turning it off entirely to see if that helps. I just noticed that it was set to a setting where it would start AFTER the display goes to sleep. I'll report back.

Wally, you said it's driving Apple crazy too, Is there a bug logged with Apple?

OK, so I think I solved my issue. It was caused by the system not going to sleep (The screensaver thing was a dead end).

When I ran the console app pmset, I got something like this:

➜ ~ pmset -g assertions

12-06-29 9:11:06 AM EDT

Assertion status system-wide:

PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep 0

CPUBoundAssertion 0

DisableInflow 0

ChargeInhibit 0

PreventSystemSleep 1

PreventUserIdleSystemSleep 0

ExternalMedia 0

DisableLowPowerBatteryWarnings 0

EnableIdleSleep 1

NoRealPowerSources_debug 0

UserIsActive 0

ApplePushServiceTask 0

The process that was causing PreventSystemSleep to be 1 was "org.cups.cupsd" which is the print service. So I checked all my printers, one of them was "In Use". When I opened it, there weren't any jobs listed. I went through the options and selected Jobs > Show Everyone's Jobs and sure enough there was a job there. I deleted it and everything seems to work now.

The odd thing is that print job was probably from my other account which didn't seem to have this screen problem. Anyway, I hope this helps anyone out there....

This just happened to me. Though I cannot remember if my computer was plugged in when I shut the lid at work. When I got home I plugged in my MBP, opened the lid and the screen was dark. I pressed the power button to shut it down, and after 30 seconds hit the power button again. This time the MBP turned on flashed the start up screen (without the apple logo) and went dark. This happened a few times. After a few unsuccessful tries I repeatedly tapped the brighness buttons and the MBP came back to life.

NO CLUE IF TAPPING THE BRIGHTNESS BUTTONS WAS WHAT DID IT, but it worked for me...