[TechniSol]

I'm going way out on a limb here, like usual, but perhaps if something is touching the screen(Clarification for the terminally pickyune: not necessarily touching, but interrupting the IR beams like a touch would) while the reader has yet to fully power off, the Neonode IR hardware is left powered up because it is detecting an interruption of the beams while the processor shuts down? I'm not sure if the Neonode chip is controlling the IR emitters directly? This might explain why units seem to sleep, but lose power while appearing to be powered down.

It'd be very interesting if someone with an IR sensitive camcorder filmed their Kobo experiencing the problem when shutting it down in a fairly dark room to confirm that the IR shuts down even if there is something in contact with, or near enough to break the IR beams, the screen during power down...

Like I said, way out on a limb. Just a crazy-assed guess, but it might explain some of what has been observed.