Win7 sleep does a hibernate also; won't wake up

I have a curious problem with sleep mode on my Win7 build. These issues are usually traced to needing an updated driver for the video card, but I have the most recent one and it didn't make a difference.

My system specs can be seen by clicking on More Information under my avatar, then Member Configuration. Win7 on an SSD on an Asus P7C55D Deluxe.

When I select "Sleep" from the shutdown menu, the system does go into what I usually see for sleep mode. It powers down the monitor and the moving drives, and the power light goes into a slow blink state. So far, normal. If I press the power button to come out of sleep, drives spin but the monitor does not come on and I can't do anything. Not what one wants, but not unusual if there are drivers or hardware that do not support sleep mode.

Then I pressed the hard-reset button. BIOS started as expected, but when it came time to start Win7 it restored the last session state, as if coming out of hibernate. That's unexpected: It went into the sleep state, but also wrote out hiberfile.sys. Or was that "it hibernated, but also went into sleep state?"

And Hibernate does not appear on my Shutdown menu as a choice. So for a while, I would select Sleep, cut power, and reboot. Recently, I assigned the Hibernate function to the power button, and I get a clean Hibernate when I press that button.

Anyone have a suggestion how I can get true Sleep mode? This same machine does true Sleep mode in XP if I boot my XP drive, with the same video card and even the same ancient SCSI card.