When I leave Suse 9.2 alone for a little while, naturally, the screen saver comes on. If I leave it alone fora little while longer, the monitor shuts down, (all those electrons running around can be pretty power consuming!)

Anywho, I move the mouse to wake the monitor up from standby, and it does indeed "wake up" to show the desktop, I go to enter a command in the console, or something to that extent, and woe is me to find that my mouse and keyboard have been rendered incompatible, or something.

After the monitor wakes up, my mouse and keyboard just simple won't respond, I was thinking it was a problem with my ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, but I'm still a n00b, so I wouldn't know.

I don't want you to go through lots of effort, but if you can at least point me in some direction other than google (which I've already tried), it will be very much appreciated.

My experience with screensavers is that they're often problematic. I never use them, I just set my screen to go on standby after 2 / 3 minutes. The original purpose of screensavers was to prevent monitor burnout (physical damage to the screen from displaying the same image for too long) but this isn't necessary with modern monitors.

If you can live without the screensaver, then I suggest that you just disable it and go to monitor standby sooner.