tp40 screen blanks forever

[Randy Bush]

thinkpad t40p
4.9-stable as of friday, all cvsupped and portupgraded to death

SYMPTOM: if i leave the desktop alone for maybe an hour, the screen
is blanked and i can not get it back, even by killing X.  i have to
reboot the machine to get the screen back

bios has screen blanking turned off

does not happen when X/gnome have not been started, i.e. running as
a non-X user

gnome screensaver set to DisableScreenSaver

still happens if i kill the xscreensaver process

xset has dpms disabled

help, i am running out of goat entrails!

randy