Guitar Hero III for PC not playing nicely with power saving on Vista

I recently purchased Guitar Hero III for PC and while the game itself is fun and runs fine, the software in general is not very respectful to my settings.

My biggest gripe is that it seemingly disables monitor sleep mode. I have my monitor sleep after five minutes and I can see the importance of disabling that for the duration of the game, but after I exit my monitor doesn't sleep anymore, what's worse is that even after reboots it still doesn't sleep. I checked the power management control panel and all my settings are intact, so GH3 is doing something more sneaky.

A lesser, superficial gripe is that it disables cursor shadows after every exit, but at least I can fix that myself.

To add insult to injury, GH3 complains that its "security software" cannot load and the game terminates if I try to run Sysinternals Process Monitor to see what it's sticking its hands into.

To get back to the primary concern though, does anyone know what the game could be doing to break my power saving settings like this and if there's a way to fix it?

Thanks!

I'm having problems with GH3 for PC too. I have Vista Ultimate, and when I run GH3, My monitor will go into sleep mode after 10 minutes or so. I thought that was supposed to be disabled while I'm doing stuff!!!!! The other day, after playing GH3, I was working, when all of a sudden, my monitor went dim, and the computer locked itself. I jiggled my mouse, the lights came back on, and I was asked for my password to unlock my account.

Weird stuff.

I spent some time today sleuthing and it appears that when the guitar controller is unplugged, the system will power down the monitor according to the settings.

This brings up another question. Why does the guitar disable monitor sleep? (my mouse, another USB device, does not) Is there a way to override the setting?

I'm experiencing exactly the same problem... does anyone know a real fix besides unplugging the controller? Thanks!