Sims2 Simmy Blue Screen of Death

So with my past two or three computers, I could run The Sims 2, get tired, save my game and pause it, turn off my monitor, go to bed, wake up, grab some breakfast, turn my monitor on again and resume playing TS2 over breakfast, without needing to restart TS2 and wait through that obnoxiously long loading screen.

With my kinda-sorta new (read: refurbished) Dell Precision running Windows 7, that is no longer the case. I turn on the monitor, wake my computer from Sleep Mode (which it enters after a few hours of idleness) and find that my game has been frozen, reduced to a blue window that takes up about half of my 1920x1080 desktop. And I can never simply resume the game where I left off, no matter how I Alt-Tab back into it, click back into it or run the Task Manager and switch to the game that way. I am always left with no choice but to kill TS2 via the Task Manager (since neither left-clicking the red X nor right-clicking the task bar and trying the Close Window option ever work), restart TS2 and eat my now-boring breakfast while TS2 loads...and loads...and loads.

Offhand, would y'all say that I need to completely disable my Energy Saver settings? Or is there a roundabout way to put the kibosh on this Simmy Blue Screen of Death?

Nevermind; it turns out that I just have to wait about two to five minutes for the game to reload. I was just being impatient, I guess. >_<