I have a problem with my two Windows 7 setups at home. Whenever a scheduled task wakes up the machines from sleep, a black screen with a mouse cursor appears. If I move the mouse or press any key, desktop appears.

The biggest problem is that during that black screen phase the display, sometimes even the PC too, doesn't go to stand by after a set period of time in power settings. If I get the desktop to show up, standby functions work fine. Display goes blank after a few minutes and as soon as the task doesn't need the PC, it goes back to sleep.

It's frustrating that this "feature" is wasting energy and keeps lighting up the pc in the middle of the night for me to find it that way after I wake up.

I found a handful of threads on the intertubes about the issue, but there were no answers in any of them.

It sometimes happens in my XP machine at work as well.