In my experience, Suspend has always been flakey. I'll have to give Hibernate a shot.
IME, Suspend depends on how much available memory you have. It's always flakey for me but then I tend to have little space. I run 98, anyway, which seems to find any reason it wants to cut out.
One technical difference between Suspend and Hibernate is that the former stores information in RAM, while the latter stores it on disk. This allows hibernate to completely turn the machine off, while suspend requires the RAM to continue getting power so as not to lose the data.
So is there any disadvantage to Hibernating as compared to Shutting Down the whole computer?
I guess in theory it's good to restart properly once in a while, as it ensures that everything shuts down correctly and gives the OS and apps a chance to initialize themselves. But generally, hibernating should work fine on a day to day basis.
Yeah, with all these patches, I'm "encouraged" to do a full power cycle somewhat regularly...