Mine will wake the screen and make "device connected" and "device disconnected" sounds while the computer isn't sleeping, regularly. Besides being annoying (I eventually disabled those specific sounds), it probably meaningfully hurts the lifespan of my monitors to power cycle them every five freakin' minutes.

I've never been able to figure out what exactly is happening here, trawling through event logs and such (I'm no Windows guru nor do I want to be).

At this point, in my particular case, Linux actually feels more "hardware compatible" than Windows. It can keep the monitors off.

I really wish Windows was good enough to not raise my blood with things like this, because sometimes you just need to use it.