Shutdown with eGPU on X220T

The eGPU in my sig works great still aside from the dealextreme mini-HDMI cable I bought going bad recently, but I have finally narrowed down an issue I've been having. To start it up I shutdown my laptop then connect the E2C2, power on the eGPU, and boot up. When I want to disconnect I shutdown my laptop, power off the eGPU, unplug the E2C2, then power on the laptop.

My issue is that after I unplug it, when I power up my laptop again it lights up, then shutdowns immediately, then powers itself up again and works like normal... until I try to sleep the laptop. When it goes into Sleep Mode the first time after unplugging the eGPU it does not wake up and keeps trying to reboot unsuccessfully until I remove the battery and ac adapter then power on the laptop. After this hard restart, Windows warns me that my laptop shutdown unexpectedly, but my laptop works perfectly afterwards as if nothing happened, Sleep Mode or no sleep mode.

My question: is there any way to avoid this unpleasant infinite reboot after putting my laptop into Sleep Mode the first time after disconnecting my eGPU?

 

I re-installed Windows 7 to properly align my SSD, but this sleep mode issue is still present. However, one thing I did was set the NVIDIA Driver Service to Manual in order to control the number of processes running. What I noticed, after disconnecting the eGPU, was that the service started on its own and was running before I slept my X220T. Of course it crashed afterwards, as always immediately after disconnecting the eGPU, but after hard-restarting I noticed the service did not start automatically.

Perhaps this service is the cause. I'll try enabling then sleeping the laptop while connected to the eGPU and disconnected to see what happens.

EDIT: disabling/re-enabling the service then going into Sleep mode without the eGPU being connected at all does nothing.

This whole issue is probably due to windows getting confused with the power states and the sudden changes in active GPU or weird Optimus consequences, but I'll still play around with settings to see what I find.

 

After creating my enclosure I decided to play around a bit when disconnecting my eGPU, and here is one solution to my problem:

1. Shutdown X220T, power off and unplug eGPU.
2. Boot up, [disable the NVIDIA Display Service in services.msc] (I just didn't want this starting up when I'm on HD3000 graphics...not sure if it affected anything).
3. Shutdown X220T AGAIN <--- I think this solved it.
4. Boot up.

Sleep Mode works fine after the second shutdown, no problems no crashes. Hope this helps someone.