Before you come up with the obvious answer, please note that I have set the laptops so that they are all configured with the setting "When I close the lid: DO NOTHING" in their power settings.

Okay, in my day to day work I need to do some software testing on laptops which contain embedded GOBI-brand WWAN chipsets. These are nifty little chipsets which contain both a GSM+CDMA cellular modem and a NMEA GPS receiver that outputs on a standard COM port. These laptops are very common and are sold by many different brands, I've got a pile of HP's, Dells, Acers, Panasonics, and Lenovos, and they all use either a Gobi 1000 or a Gobi 2000 chip set for this task.

What this all means is that you can connect these laptops to any cellular carrier and get GPS information, all without any external dongles on the laptop.

However, sometimes I want to do this with the laptop's lid closed. And even though I set the operating system so that the laptops do not go to sleep when I close the lid, the NMEA GPS stream stops dead as soon as I shut the lid. Everything else keeps running as far as I can tell, but the GPS goes poof. (The cellular modem might go poof, too, but I'm not sure about that, and at the moment the GPS is my primary concern.)

I have, on one of the Gobi 2000 laptops, dug into all the power management settings and disabled everything that looked like it might remotely be related. Even things I didn't understand like "USB Selective Suspend" and "Link State Power Management". I went through all the devices in the Device Manager that looked like they might be related (Com ports, network adapters, USB devices, PCI express devices, etc.) and looked for a Power Management tab. For any one that had a Power Management tab, I unchecked the "allow the system to turn off this device to save power" check box. All of that, and still the same behavior.

Anyone know why this happens, and if it can be worked around?