I have no idea which messages you are talking about and how they would be related to initscripts. Could you enlighten me?

When go send your system to standby, your current active console/X11, etc disappears and normally a black screen with some messages appears for a few seconds so that you can follow the suspend process.

When you go to suspend to ram, you can read

Stopping tasks.. done
Suspending console(s)

before the machine actually suspends.

When you enter suspend to disk mode, powersave displays some more messages, including a percentage how much data has been copied to disk. I find this quite useful since it can take some time to write your ram data to disk, and so you know what's going on.
That's also one reason why I'm still using powersave since pm-utils don't display messages anymore.
(The other reason is that it doesn't work properly for me and powersave does..)
Furthermore the kernel suspend to ram (current 2.6.23) "echo mem > /sys/power/state" also displays these messages.

I think with the new initscripts these messages may be still present but for some reason they are not displayed anymore and I get a totally black screen with a flashing cursor instead.

If you could tell me how to catch the suspend messages (to a file or picture) I would post them here, but since they are only displayed when entering suspend, I don't know how to do this...

I've browsed the initscripts changelog down to 2007.08-3 and didn't see a change that could prevent such messages from displaying. :-/

status in 2008.02 ?

Hm, same behavior :/

Okay, I tried a few things and finally figured it out:

in /etc/rc.sysinit comment the following lines:

375 for i in $(seq 1 63); do
376 printf "\e%G" > /dev/vc/${i}
377 done

I'm not quite sure what these lines do, but without them everything works fine again,
with 2007.11 as well as with 2008.02 !

These lines switch consoles to UTF-8 mode.
What are your LOCALE, CONSOLEFONT etc?

the values from rc.conf are:

LOCALE="en_US.utf8"
HARDWARECLOCK="localtime"
TIMEZONE=Europe/Berlin
KEYMAP="de-latin1-nodeadkeys"
CONSOLEFONT=
CONSOLEMAP=
USECOLOR="yes"

Weird, I don't understand why the hell the output could disappear.
Anyway those lines won't be removed, because it effectively breaks UTF-8 output before the first login.

> When go send your system to standby, your current active console/X11, etc disappears and normally a black screen with some messages appears for a few seconds so that you can follow the suspend process.

I wonder what this means. Do powersave use some hacks to display information on a console? :-/
BTW, what is powersave? I cannot find a package with such name. Which package contains it?

Powersave was replaced by pm-utils which does not seem to display any messages.
If you use the kernel suspend to ram mode ( "echo mem > /sys/power/state" ) you can also see some messages.

I do still have the powersave pkg.tar.gz but don't have the source anymore :/
The only reason I still use powersave is that you can see the progress of hibernating.
I wonder if it was possible to add the percentage of data copied to pm-utils.

did you try it with kernel 2.6.24? UTF-8 mode is the default there, so it might work without removing \e%G
anyway, I'm going to close this bugreport as "Not a bug" because there is really no bug in our initscripts in this area.