Yesterday I installed the newest distro of Crunchbang RO20111125
installed.
I've always liked Crunchbang because it was extremely fast and lightweight, yet easy to use. The only problems I had were some of the issues with powersaving

I had just finished a sentence to a friend of mine about how it seems that they finally worked out all the bugs when my touchpad/keyboard froze. I had to hard reboot.

I would attach a log but I've been going through all my logs and don't see anything relevant. Where could I find crash info on this.
Strangely a lot of my logs don't seem to go back any farther than yesterday about 4 hours after the crash when I restarted my system.

This laptop is a warrenty replacement, different brand but very similar hardware. i3, Nvidia 520m 4meg ram etc. I've been running crunchbang for a long time and never seen this before. Any ideas?

I trust you meant "4gigs ram."

One thing to check is that the fans are working and the vents are clear. When you are using it, make sure it's on a surface where none of the vents are blocked. Overheating is the most common cause of unexpected shutdowns. Perhaps it's implicated in this case, also.

It will likely be impossible to determine the cause of one random computer lockup. I would recommend using a light-weight system monitor such as Gkrellm or Conky, turning on the temperature monitor, and keeping a wary eye on the indicators. (The temp monitors won't work unless the computer has temp sensors, but most contemporary laptops do.)

My previous laptop had many heat issues and I've always been paranoid about heat. When it locked up it was on a flat uncluttered table. It's only two days old and running in a fairly dust free environment, it also appears to run fairly cool compared to other laptops. Also when it crashed I was running conkey with a load of 1-2% as the only thing that was open was a shell. I probably should set up conkey to monitor heat. Currently, sitting on my lap it seems to idle around 49.0C Not great, but good for a laptop.

Do you have any idea what log I should reference for crash data?

I agree, heat is likely not an issue.

You could try /var/log/messages. That's the first place I'd look.

If it locked up that tight, it's possible the system didn't get a chance to log anything.