I figured that I should share this information for those of you out there running Vista as your base OS.  This way you won't have the same fun as I did trying to get things back in working order.

So, I pediorically run Disk Cleanup Tool on my system to clean up all of the files that Windows decides to create as it runs.

Windows Disk Cleanup

While looking through the list of cleanup items, I noticed an item called Hibernation File Cleaner with a size of 1.99 GB!  (This is the actual size of your hibernation file used by Windows when you put your system under hibernation).  My first impression was this HUGE file has to go!! 

Hibernation File Cleaner

So, what did I do? Yep, delete it.  Yeah, I know, wrong thing to do.  Specially since the Description groupbox explicitly says,

If you use hibernation on this computer, do not remove this file.

Side effect?  Well, the file was removed from my hard drive and hibernation was turned off.  So, I went back to the Power Options... section in Vista to turn hibernation back on, and ... it wasn't there!  I re-booted to accept the changes and it still wasn't there! WTF!?!  After a quick search with Google, I found out this KB article.

For some reason, the hibernation option was no longer visible through the options settings.  To make it visible again, you have to run the following command line command:

powercfg /hibernate on

After running this command and a quick restart, I was back in working order!!

I hope this post helps anybody out with this similar issue...Yeah, I feel like an idiot. ;-)