Linux Mint - monitor will not wake up from sleep

So I recently built a machine out of some spare parts I had laying around, mainly for the kids' room to play video and do some simple things like word processing and the Internet. Saw no point in paying money for an OS, so went with Linux for really the first time I have ever seriously dived into it.

It works fine so far, with one exception: When I put the machine to sleep, it wakes up fine but the monitor will not come back on, no matter what I do. Most of what I've read on the subject points to either needing a driver update for your GPU, or else some patch that breaks things even worse, then by the end the problem is still not fixed, and along the way some helpful chap chimes in with "this distro is crap." I did try downloading the "latest" drivers directly from Nvidia, but upon trying to install them, got an error message because they were 32-bit drivers and not compatible with my 64-bit Mint 12.

Further adding to my confusion, what's available on the net seems to suggest that Mint 12 comes with the GPU drivers you need preinstalled out of the box. Am a bit confused about what to try next. Any help much appreciated. If it helps, here are the specs of the machine:

CPU: Intel q6600 (stock 2.4ghz)
mobo: Intel DP45SG
RAM: OCZ DDR3 2x2GB 1066-8-8-8
GPU: EVGA GeForce 8400GS
PSU: Antec Earthwatts 600
HDD: WD Caviar Green 640GB
Monitor: HP 2009m

Yeah, I said it was made out of spare parts.

Well, it looks petty decent for spare parts, here is the link for the 64bit/linux
GeForce 8400 GS
but it seams like is something else, maybe a kernel/cpu issue.

Well, try the simplest solution first, they say ... so I'll see if that driver helps any.

I do remember using this same monitor with the same motherboard/BIOS settings on a Windows machine (the machine about half these parts came out of) and it did not have this problem. So am pretty sure it has to do with something specific to the different OS. We'll see.