[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] sound74145:
I am a broadcast engineer and have been a Linux user for the last decade. So when Android hit it was only a matter of whose device. After a lot of research and waiting for 6 months for the initial “teething pains” to pass selected the Captivate for several reasons.

As a broadcast engineer 24/7 reliable cellular communication with data is a professional necessity not a convenience. For that reason my wife always has the same phone as I carry as a backup. If mine gets broken or unusable for any reason we switch SIMs and I am back to work. So we both received our initial “trade up” Captivates at the same time. About 25 days after receiving our phones mine started randomly shutting itself off. After three warranty replacements finally got one that stayed on. Six months later wife's was replaced due to no audio from the speaker. Later after my father past my mother merged into our family plan and choose Captivate as well.

So we have three Captivates in our family. Love the phones. Mine by my nature is loaded with “all the bells & whistles.” Lots of app, widgets and rooted. As soon as I am comfortable with my choice and feel prepared will take the plunge and try flash a custom ROM. More than likely several through ROM manager of some kind. I really like to looks of the four tap lock and other features only a custom ROM is going to get you. Besides I am a “power user,” which my wife thinks translates to “if it works, it doesn't have enough features.” My wife has a few widgets & apps as well as my mother to a lesser degree.

In the last 90 days we all three have been experiencing something that I describe as a “loop soft rebooting.” Started with my wife, she described it a “loop rebooting.” Every weekday from 10:00 to 10:20. Once I had a chance to observe I found it does not do a complete reboot. It does not show the shut down animation like a controlled shut down. Or the turn on animation like a power up after a complete shut down or OS crash. I would describe it as more like a “soft boot.” Almost like a launcher crash, but it also has to rescan the SD media. It vibrates once with the screen off or on, in use or out. then twice more, another 8 to 10 seconds another vibrator alert then the launcher appears and starts to load widgets, apps & scan media. Completely unresponsive to any key input until after the launcher reopens. The wife has never used anything but the AT&T/Samsung stock launcher. I did all the usual things. Backup, factory reset, restore. Still does it. Backup, Hard reset, restore, still doing it. Hard reset, rebuild from scratch, no restore, stayed completely vanilla, no apps or widgets at all. It still does it. Then mine started doing it. I was using ADW Launcher, switched to Launcher Pro, have even dropped down to using the original launcher since it acts like a launcher crash. No affect. Went through all the above same process with the same results. Mine does it's act between 5:00 & 5:20. About a week later my mother reported hers does the same thing between 4:00 & 4:20. Interesting side note, if we turn off the radio (airplane mode) it does NOT do it, completely stable in PDA mode. But when we turn the phone back on, it then starts the process and runs for 20 minutes and stops. I have been collecting logs off my wife and my own phone but work duties have not given me the opportunity to read through the thousands of lines of logs to find a “smoking gun.” Now in the last week we see the same activity more often and for longer periods. Because turning off the radio stops the activity there has to be a trigger from the network. It also uses lots of data during these periods. Maxed out my wife's data plan the last 3 months. We have Lookout Security installed on all three phones and it reports no Trojan's, viruses etc... Also the Hard reset should have killed anything like that. I have done hard resets three time on my wife and my own phone and rebuild from scratch now. We have left her phone completely factory fresh only adding back her contacts through Gmail. I have Titanium Backup and have tried “freezing” & unfreezing” everything I can think of. Nothing but turning off the radio seems to effect this issue.

Has anybody out there experienced anything like this???