Various hardware annoyances (likely involving hal)

[elbartoqwertyuiop]

Right now, there are two things on my laptop that aren't working like they should.

One is the battery monitor applet for KDE4. It displays the status of the the AC adaptor when the the computer was booting and does not change when I plug or unplug the adaptor. However, it still shows the correct charge and state of the battery. "cat /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/ACAD/state" accurately detects the presence of the adaptor while "hal-device | grep adapter" does not leads to believe that the problem is caused by hal.

Also, when I suspend my computer to RAM, it resumes to an unresponsive terminal that has to be shut down bu holding the power button. Suspend to ram works on the Ubuntu installation on the same computer, so I know the problem is not in the bios, but I'm completely dumbfounded as to that the problem might be.