AFAIK acpi SHOULD have been an industrial standard, but every manufactor implemented it differently.
ACPI is making trouble on many machines, but before guessing or blindly installing, one should try to get sure about the reason.

Did the behaviour vanish, when booting with acpi=off?

There is a brief documentation of PowerManagement in the kernel-docs, either on your machine:
file:///usr/src/linux/Documentation/pm.txt
or in the net, if not installed.
http://mirror.trouble-free.net/kerne...ntation/pm.txt

I would google for my specific machine and wait for someone announcing success.
For me, I disabled acpi for my laptop, and enabled apm, waiting for improvements

Unfortunately, I don't know a central hardware-page, where models, drivers etc. are reported.

If you still want to install a new kernel, read at least the Changelogs.