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I want the power button on my Windows 7 desktop to put the system to sleep. I can instruct Windows 7 to do this via the Control Panel, and this works, but every time I re-boot, the setting reverts from "sleep" to "shut-down". This can cause serious problems if I accidentally shut the system down when I wanted it to sleep.

How do I get Windows 7 to honor the setting I'm making in the Control Panel?

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This isn't normal behavior. Can you provide a little more detail as to what software you've got installed, whether you're on a domain environment, are you running as an admin, etc? – Shinrai Mar 21 '11 at 14:09
I am the sole user and run with Admin privileges at home; not a domain environment. I have LOTS of software installed: I don't know where to begin. – jon bondy Mar 21 '11 at 15:05
Anything you can think of that might alter power settings? There's gotta be something doing it. :/ Try changing the setting in Safe Mode? – Shinrai Mar 21 '11 at 15:20
Would there be an "Event" associated with such a change? Would looking in the system event logs be helpful? – jon bondy Mar 21 '11 at 16:08
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3 Answers

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This isn't typical and your setting changes should change. Are any of your other setting changes not saving? If it's a new problem, you might want to try doing a system restore and seeing if your changes are holding following that. You could also try playing around with the power management settings as well: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/Sleep-and-hibernation-frequently-asked-questions

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Check your BIOS power management settings, they can conflict with the Windows settings.

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To get to the absolute bottom of this problem might take a bit of investigative work...

  1. Try changing the setting to how you want it, then dumping the whole registry to a .reg file.
  2. Reboot
  3. Dump the .reg file again
  4. Compare the two reg files (WinMerge)
  5. Set a program like Process Monitor to run at start up and see if you can find what is changing the key.
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