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In another update, I've updated fdc (the floppy disk controller) so that it supports suspend/resume even if a floppy drive is present. There is one caveat though -- namely that the drive must be empty. Still, its far easier to pull a disk out of a drive (if you even have one -- most floppy drives these days probably see very little, if any, use), than to disconnect the drive entirely.

You can download the file from the device drivers download page (look for a file named fdc-2008-11-01.tar.gz). A webrev of the changes is also posted.

For the curious, the reason for the above caveat is best stated by the following explanation extracted from a comment in the code:
Bad, bad, bad things will happen if someone changes the disk in the drive while it is mounted and the system is suspended. We have no way to detect that. (Undetected filesystem corruption. Its akin to changing the boot disk while the system is suspended. Don't do it!)

So we refuse to suspend if there is media present in the drive. This limits some of the usability of suspend/resume, but it certainly avoids this potential filesytem corruption from pilot error. Given the decreasing popularity of floppy media, we don't see this as much of a limitation.
Anyway, I suspect these changes may have little value to laptops, but may help a lot of desktops. It certainly addresses the problem of SUSPEND for my Dell Precision M390.

Update: Thanks to Jürgen Keil's testing, we have found a bug, which I've fixed. The webrev and the binaries have been updated accordingly. Look for the 11-04 release instead.