Computer freezes going into standby

I have my computer set to go into standby mode after three hours. I leave it on overnight, and when I come back in the morning the monitor is off. I'll press a key and the windows xp "Preparing to Standby..." screen comes up. It is frozen like this and won't respon to anything. I have to restart it. I have service pack two. Anyone know what could be causing this problem? Thanks for any help.

 

I do have a screen saver running. I had the default windows XP one set up but changed it to one of the 3d ones that comes with windows. Both of them froze on me. I'll try and turn it off and see if that helps.

 

No such luck. I turned the screen saver off and set the computer to go into standby after 1 minute to see what would happen. Oddly, it didn't do it. I then went to the start menu and manually put it into standby, but it just froze at the Preparing To Standby screen. I'm wondering if maybe there's some sort of program running in the background that won't let it go into standby properly? This problem was also on my last computer. When I reformat it usually goes away but comes back so maybe it's a program/driver I'm running? Any thoughts?
Thanks for the help so far.

On the flip side, would it hurt my computer at all to just leave it on, not in standby mode? I'm not overclocking at all but I'm wondering if it'll put more stress on my components than having it standby when I go to bed.

 

This computer wouldn't happen to be Media Center Edition? Would it? I believe there was a rare flaw that when standby or hibernation was established, the exact same thing happened, with what you are describing.

I leave my computer running all the time with no screen saver. I just turn off my monitor, when I'm not using it, since it is the only light source in my "computer/junk" room. I never turn on the room light.

Btw, there is a "patch" to fix this rare issue. If you do not have MCE, then I won't bother hunting it down.

 

No, I've got XP. Thanks for the thought though. I guess I'll just leave it on and hope that it fixes itself some day.

Thanks again