Problems 16 and 17: system freezes after going to sleep, and missing info in the logs

My system went to sleep (suspend to disk, at a guess) because the battery was low, and when it tried to wake up, it froze completely at some point, refusing to respond to keyboard. At that point it was showing me a suse logo with a progress bar, but hard drive activity stopped completely, and nothing but a hard shutdown worked. Suspend to disk worked without any problems whatsoever in 10.0. This might be an instance of my general lockdown/uninterruptible sleep problem, or a new problem, but there is no way to tell. It turns out that messages from boot sequences don't go to /var/log/messages anymore - in fact, they are not saved anywhere at all, the best I can tell. This is a change from my previous configurations, and not something that I did. I guess I will have to figure out what's going on with log files soon, if I am to diagnose any of my issues (hotkey-setup, which is still disabled due to system lockdowns, is another one)