Laptop Weirdness

Something weird is going on with this laptop, and I'm not sure what it is.

The manifestations are either that I'll start it up (bringing it up from standby), and it'll fail to connect to the router, or I'll go to shut down, putting it back into standby, and it'll tell me that the 'O2MICROSMARTCARD in the O2MICROSMARTCARDREADER is preventing the laptop from entering standby. If I force it to turn off by holding the power button in, it'll start back up, usually -- but sometimes it won't. This morning, it'd just click at me. I plugged it into the power card in the library, which is a generic power cord I'd gotten, and it wouldn't start -- but when I plugged it into the Dell power cord in the bedroom, it did start. Once it came up, I looked at the battery, and it was about fully charged -- so it shouldn't have failed to start on battery.

What it feels like is that something is interrupting what I'll call the power sequence (I don't know the 'right phrase'), so that it can't go through a shutdown sequence because something is saying 'no, you're not allowed to stop me', and when I start it, that same something is preventing the PC from a) getting power, even though the battery is charged, or b) if it does come up, from starting everything --- in this card, the logical connection to the router. I looked in System/SmartCard, and found that 'device', but I'm not sure what it is -- though I have a suspicion that it's the bay that can accept either a power card or the CD reader. Pulling that out (leaving the laptop on just the internal battery) has no effect -- whatever didn't work before, still doesn't work.

And sometimes, after all of this, I get a system dump, and the laptop shuts down. This has never happened before.

All of this started around the time that I installed the external hard drive, but for the life of me, I can't figure out how those two could possibly be connected.

Very strange. A little scary.

Wonder if this kind of thing happens to Mac laptops?