Quote:
It's possible for this to fail if the power comes back on in the few seconds between OS shutdown and when the power would have gone off, but there's not much you can do about that. There's no software solution, either.

Well, if by "no solution" you mean no end user solution you might be right, but it seems like APC et all could solve this in ten minutes of firmware coding for the UPS.
Code:

if (currentTime-shutdownTime<1Min) { 
     sleep();
     restartPower(); } 
else { restartPower() }

would do the trick. Of course, I thought high end UPSes already had the capability to not restart until they were at a certain charge level, to avoid an uncharged ups when confronted with a seccond power failure.

Matthew