I've got a fresh install of MX14 installed, fully updated, mouse tap disabled and working perfectly. Or so I thought. When the machine suspends, it does so and is fine. When it comes to resuming however the computer boots up, the hard drive thinks and the screen goes white and stays white. I have to reboot the computer by holding the power switch to reboot.

Ctrl+Alt+F1 does nothing (I would expect it go to terminal). Never had this problem with Lubuntu a few hours ago.

I've just tried Xubuntu. It suspends, but on resume it goes to a black screen instead. Looks like a choice of either black or white. I can press ctrl+alt+f1, blindly type in my username, my password and reboot the computer. So the computer is still there, kind of responding.

Any recommendations as to how I might solve this please?

First thing to try:

disable locking the screen when suspending. You can do this in the xfce-power-manager applet (both xubuntu and mx14 have this).

If that doesn't work, I suggest posting over at forum.mepiscommunity.org in the mx section. those guys should be able to help you, at least with MX.

I know that sometimes particular gpu/cpu/kernel combinations can cause issues with suspend/hibernate/resume features.