Lion - Screen goes black, have to power down

I have recently upgraded to lion. I'm not sure if the problem I have is hardware or software, but I figured I'd start here.

Once every few days, I'll be working on my MacBook Pro (8GB Ram, SSD) and I'll click something and the screen will go black. The keyboard stays lit up. If I close the cover, the computer will not go to sleep. The screen does not come back on when I open the screen. I have to hold down the power button and shut down, then reboot. (Fortunately, Lion is good at putting me back where I was.)

I use Parallels and I THINK it's always been open w/ my Win7 VM running, but I can't be sure. I was running that successfully before Lion.

When I restart, i get the screen indicating I had a crash and providing a dump, but nothing pops out at me on the dump.

Has anyone seen this behavior? Any ideas?

How old is your MBP? (you never mentioned year and model which would help) It sounds like a hardware problem but without doing some diagnosis it's difficult to say what it could be.

You can try running the Apple Hardware Test on your machine as a start. If your machine is still under warranty or extended Apple care you might wish to have Apple look at it.

Purchased in December. Still under warrantee. Happened again w/out Parrallels running. I'll run the utilities and see what happens, then I'll get it to the Apple Store.

I ran the diagnostics, both quick and extended. No issues reported. Will take to Apple Store.

Did you hear from the Apple store? I have the same problem. The diagnostics do not find anything wrong with my macbook pro either. My model is an end-2010 one.

Apple made a patch available for this very issue yesterday. Do a software update and it will show up for installation.