IBM Thinkpad -- Sudden Laptop Death Syndrome?

Bronz asks: "In one day I went from pondering selling my IBM Thinkpad T20 on eBay to mourning it's inevitable death, and I don't think I'm alone (nor is the T20 is the only fatality). The symptoms are illusive but a pattern may be emerging -- be wary of putting your Thinkpad into a hibernate/sleep state and leaving it connected to AC power. A cursory web search has revealed a smattering of threads detailing the illness. First it won't come out of hibernation and then it simply won't boot at all. One interesting facet of the first thread is that the frequency of posts has been steadily increasing over the past few months and doesn't seem limited to any one particular model." Has anyone else run into this problem with their Thinkpad laptop? "On a sad note, I feel I only recently exposed the machine to the problem by enabling ACPI in Fedora Core 3 (acpi=force and tinkering with the lid/sleep button events) right before I left for the Thanksgiving holiday. I closed the lid and probably sealed it's fate; first thinking it just wasn't waking up from sleep, a subsequent reboot hung but eventually started, a third boot took slightly longer to sit 'cold' before starting and the forth boot -- well, I'll tell you when/if it ever happens ... It's going on 5 hours as I type this.

Using Slashdot as a channel for tech support has never garnered many friends, but I've always thought of Thinkpads as Linux-friendly laptops and certainly a large number of Thinkpads have found their way under many Slashdot readers 'support umbrella.' Have I randomly stumbled onto a growing, serious problem -- or am I merely an unfortunate statistic at the wrong end of the bell curve? Sometimes it is difficult to determine the difference as there could be a silent majority of people who individually just thought they were unlucky."