sleepless macbook

Lately I have been experienceing a sleepless laptop.
My Macbook won’t sleep when the lid is left open; the
display sleeps, but never a full, breathing LED deep
sleep. I can force it to sleep from the apple menu,
with the remote or by closing the lid, but I often
just leave it and come back to find it with no juice.
This is my second go around with this issue. The
first time, I deleted the
com.apple.powermanagement.plist file and it remedied
by problem. That didn’t work this time, and a quick
jump into Terminal shows that the settings are in
order. Is it a rouge process keeping the system busy
(I don’t run any background apps like Quicksilver,
Ihave cover sutra but recently turned it off,
something lingering?) Its been a few weeks like this,
could it be the battery update? Can I revert? Is my
next best option is Archive and Install? Hopefully it
isn’t that drastic! Thanks for the help!

phiphika,

Have you looked at your list of active processes in the Activity Monitor program (in the Utilities folder)? You might have to click on the popup menu that says "My Processes" and select "All Processes" to make sure that no system-level processes are actively using the CPU. Don't worry about processes that are sitting at 0.00% of the CPU -- focus on the ones that actually show some CPU activity. Also, don't worry about processes that are part of the OS itself, like the WindowServer, the kernel_task, and the pmTool. If there's anything there that you don't recognize, that might be your problem.

You might also want to go into System Preferences > Energy Saver, Show Details, and make sure that your currently active profile doesn't have sleep set for a long idle period or Never -- it's possible that something might have altered that setting without you knowing it.

Hope this helps!
Fahrwahr