Comment 134 for bug 286285

I had the same problem and appear to have sorted it by updating the kernel. I added 'intrepid-proposed' to my update sources, pinned back to intrepid-updates by default (to stop everything upgrading), and upgraded just 'linux-generic' to the latest 2.6.27-10-generic version and have not seen this issue since.

  Linux shim 2.6.27-10-generic #1 SMP Fri Nov 21 19:19:18 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I haven't experience any badness from this proposed kernel with a 8.10 on a Lenovo X301, YMMV.

/etc/apt/preferences
--------------------------------
Package: *
Pin: release a=intrepid-updates
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release a=intrepid-proposed
Pin-Priority: 400
--------------------------------

Aaron.