Mystery Solved

So that thing with my computer waking up?

Shortly before I started having the problem, on Wednesday, my new TV-tuner USB device arrived. On my lunch hour I was hooking it up and trying to get it configured. Windows Media Center is really difficult to configure despite the great lengths they went to in order to try to make it “user friendly” and nagivatable with a TV remote control.

To change the input source from coax (cable) in to RCA jack input, something I might want to do frequently, you have to re-run the entire “configure your tv tuner” setup including programming the remote and checking for updates online.

There’s also this setting about “automatically updating programming guide” which has the undocumented feature of waking the computer up from hibernate to do so at a non-configurable scheduled time, and not putting the computer back to sleep after. Aha. So now Windows Media Center is set to only download manually…and it didn’t wake up on me this morning.