I have a Dell Inspiron 5000e, and none of the apm featues will work. Apmd segfaults and will not start. I can manually suspend, but not with apm. Consiquently the battery monitors do not work. I'm not sure what is at fault: apmd, my hardware, the kernel ...
Your BIOS is at fault. We're seeing this problem with a lot of Dell notebooks with some BIOS versions, and there's nothing we can do to fix it. Try getting a new BIOS from Dell. If the current version doesn't fix it, try sending them a message explaining their APM support is broken.