Well, this is very interesting. It appears that you are right. I'm sure I had the power saving option disabled at the time I installed 17.1.0 and it never occurred to me to enable it since it's one of the most common causes cited for post-sleep problems.
I reloaded the 17.1.0 driver this morning and enabled the power saving option. Since then I've run several sleep-wake cycles without a problem. I'll keep running this configuration to see how things go after a bit more time but it looks promising at this point.
D