APM and ACPI on sony Vaio Z600LEK laptop

[migmog]

I've got Xubuntu 7.04 going on my Sony Vaio Z600LEK laptop, but I have
some problems with ACPI. I'm wondering if anyone has had similar
problems...

Observations:
- Bootup usually (~80%) locks up at some point with ACPI-related
messages on screen
- This can be solved by passing 'acpi=off' as a kernel option.
- ACPI suspend goes to sleep OK, but crashes on resume.
- Using ACPI the Xubuntu battery indicator gives accurate %age but no
estimate of time
- ACPI allows the Sony hotkeys to work for brightness (but not volume)
- APM suspend works really well, wakes up and everything works.
- APM gives good information on battery life, percentage and time remaining.
- APM does not have any way to hook into events such as 'power button pressed'

So - it should be a no-brainer. Use APM. But can I hook up APM to the
power button? Can I get the sony hotkeys to work without ACPI?

Any ideas?

I know ACPI and APM can't co-exist. Would it be possible to have ACPI
loaded as a module long after bootup (say when X starts) to handle
events, and perhaps have the suspend script unload it and load the
module for APM in order to do the actual sleep/resume... then unload
itself and load up ACPI again?  That way I'd get reliable sleep/wake
hooked into the power button. The battery indicator still wouldn't
give me time remaining, but I can live without that.

Anyone tried this?

cheers
Andrew