So you are using gnome-power-manager on your laptop. You notice that sometimes when you shut the lid it suspends, and sometimes it doesn't. After a suspend it also acts a little funny, but you can't quite work out why…
The lid “up” event is not sent when you resume from suspend as the lid state changing triggers the resume, but no event is sent to userspace. This took me ages to work out yesterday. See my patch to LKML for a fix. Hopefully this is headed to 2.6.22 as it's a trivial fix, although it might be a little late in the day. Distributions might want to add this patch in the meantime.