Why isn’t Vista sleeping?
Start your troubleshooting by running powercfg /energy from a command prompt.
When finished, copy C:\Windows\System32\energy-report.html to the desktop & open it with IE.
It said the print spooler was holding the computer from going to sleep. So I ran the printer troubleshooter which stomped on a few printer settings, rebooted the computer (which we had done before but it didn’t fix the issue and sure enough… it went to sleep automagically as it used to.
From:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2010/04/21/sister-fix-it-list.aspx