sleep mode in WinME

I have a P3/800 running WinMe w/128mb RAM and an nVIDIA GeForce2 256 DDR accelerator. If I idle long enough for the system to go into sleep mode the display becomes 3 vertical lines instead of shutting off and the system becomes unresponsive to even the 3 finger salute. It looks like the screen has been split into 3 vertical sections, then each section is squeezed down to about a quarter inch wide with normal black background. Moving the mouse or hitting ctrl-esc or anything else that shouldchange the appearance of the screen doesn't seem to affect the appearance of these lines as it should if it were a refresh rate issue. The only thing i've been able to do in this situation is hard boot, and the display looks fine again as long as idon't let it sleep. It does bring up a popup that says something about failure to recover from sleep mode and asks if i want to disable sleep mode, and i initially chose yes, disable it, but that didn't actually shut it off or solve the problem, i had to manually go into display properties and shut off all energy saver features. Whether or not a screen saver is set seems to have no influence on the problem.

By the way, if anyone is considering answering this with "wipe your hard disk and re-install your OS" please don't bother, i'm looking for an answer to the problem not a lazy workaround.