On my Toshiba I have options to go into standby or hibernation when closing the lid. I have it set to hibernation.
When I open the lid, it will automatically come out of hibernation and load up what I had loaded last.
The beauty of this is, when it turns on, it shows the BIOS screen boot devices icons, where I can pick devices to boot from, if left it, it will boot Windows XP by default. I have a triple boot system, and dual HD bays, I have Fedora loaded on the second hard drive, so while my windows XP load is in hibernation I can boot into Linux as use it.

Although I have yet to sort out hibernation in Fedora!

I have no options to control what happens when I open the lid in both the Toshiba utility or the BIOS, but it will only start up automatically if it was hibernating. If it's in standby I have to press the power button or a key.. Which is understandable.

Are you using just the standard Windows power utility or a Sony power utility? I have to load all the Toshiba power management utils to get it to work properly.

cheers
Jaidev