Laptop sometimes semi-dies when power settings turn off monitor

[garyfritz]

My laptop has had a very annoying problem almost since it was new (and unfortunately I was swamped at the time and didn't get it dealt with through warranty).  When the power settings shut off the monitor(s), it sometimes gets hosed.  I come back to a dark screen and an unresponsive system.  At first I thought it was totally locked up, but then I tried a couple of remote-desktop apps (Microsoft and Chrome) on my phone.  I discovered the system WAS alive, sorta, but the monitors wouldn't turn on.  From the remote-desktop app I could see and pan around on the desktop.  Mouse clicks didn't usually work very well, but I could often right-click on the Windows start button and try to initiate a clean shutdown.  But that basically never worked.  Usually it stops responding to mouse clicks at all after a few clicks.

Last week I saw a new behavior.  It locked up, I used the remote app, and I found there was a blue dialog on the screen that said "Another session for your user is blocked notifying Local Session Manager for 2466 minutes, so we are unable to log you in. Do you want to force logoff that session to continue?” 2466 minutes (1.7 days) was apparently the last time it hung. 😕  I tried clicking the button to force logoff, but it just displayed "Please Wait" with a spinny circle.  After 20 minutes I gave up and killed the power.

This usually happens overnight.  Roughly once a week, sometimes more often.  It's cost me a lot of lost effort and unsaved work.  I should train myself to hibernate the system before I walk away at night, but often I have processes running in the background that I don't want to shut down overnight.  I would LIKE this system to quit seizing up. 

I updated to the latest F.34 BIOS.  I haven't tried messing with graphics drivers yet, but I did that the last time I fought with this last year.  Currently I'm running the 25.20.100.6373 Intel driver, which is the current driver per the HP support site.  I've disabled the Radeon graphics.

This is running Windows 10 Pro in a non-domain environment.  I tried posting on a Microsoft forum and the experts there gave me suggestions that only applied to Windows 2008 Server and domain environments.  *sigh*

Has anybody seen this behavior?  Any ideas how I can fix it?