Intermittent boot problems on Macbook Pro

[omvs]

A couple months back, I had a problem with my Macbook pro it beachballed coming out of sleep, so I held the button down to force it to power down. When I tried to power it back up the display wouldn't come on, and after a few seconds the fans would stop and it would go back to a powered off state. I messed around for ~15 minutes trying to make it work and eventually it came back -- at the time I thought the solution was powering off my bluetooth mouse.

Then things fine until yesterday when a similar circumstance happened - I had completely powered off the machine so I could boot off a different drive, and when trying to power it up I got no display.... Again messed around with it for 5-10 minutes, unplugged everything, and eventually it came back to life.

I'm starting to wonder if its flakey hardware, though not sure what. Its very stable when running, and I bring it out of sleep 1-2 times a day, so even cold things seem pretty reasonable. I'm running some stress tests (Prime95) and haven't had any failures yet, so if ram/cpu is flakey, its doesnt seem very flakey.

Machine is out of warranty, and the odds of being able to reproduce in front of a Genius are very slim.

Any ideas of what might be going wrong, or things to try if this happens again?

Thanks!


Machine is: Mid 2009 17" Macbook Pro, 2.8GHz, 8GB Ram, 500GB Seagate Momentus XT HD.

 

[omvs]

Update: This happened twice more to me this week when cold booting. I did manage to bring it back to life by doing a PRAM reset (Command-option-P-R)...

Could my PRAM really be getting corrupted that much on its own? I'm wondering if the PRAM battery (if there is one) is dying/dead, but I can't seem to find any details on the web where the battery might be for this model. I opened it up quick and didn't see anything that obviously looked like a battery -- other than the huge main battery of course.

Any ideas if there is a PRAM battery and where its located on my model? Or other ideas why my machine is flaking out somethings?