I didn't have this "standby of death" problem until I applied Verizon's MR2 update. For a number of reasons, I flashed back to MR1 and I'm still having SoD problems.
I've read through this thread and the one on
xda-developers and I've tried just about everything that's been mentioned unless it's clearly crazy. I've come to believe that this problem is
definitely because the device becomes busy and ignores the backlight button. The behaviour I'm seeing just isn't predictable, sometimes sliding the keyboard open wakes up the device (usually only if it's locked), removing the stylus never does anything except turn on the backlight for the answer/start/back/endcall buttons...sometimes. Sometimes I can turn on a bluetooth headset, or plug in a charger, or connect it to a PC, and hit the backlight button and it'll turn on.
Usually, I have to either send it an SMS (google voice ftw) or call it to get it to wake up.
It'll always come back if I leave it for a few minutes.
This sounds to me like the button to turn on the backlight isn't being given a high enough priority on the CPU and the CPU is therefore allowed to ignore the button being pressed. Now, I have no idea how Windows Mobile works internally, but this seems like a simple software fix to raise the priority of backlight button events.