[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] h4ck3rc1:
I can also verify that the soft button issue has nothing to do with custom ROMS. I flashed CMW same as a few others following this post:

*** LINK *** , I then Installed the SU package and rebooted.

Soft buttons working. I then proceeded to reboot back in to CWM and do a nandroid backup. All good, rebooted normally and still had soft buttons.

I left it for a day and then this afternoon, I tried to boot into odin mode to see something and i accidentally let go of the buttons early and ended up in RAMDUMP mode.

As far as I can tell, this is the only thing I have done to make them disappear, as after that I rebooted and had no capacative buttons, ie. No lights and no response from the menu and back keys.

I also am still using stock ROM and had not attempted to flash a custom ROM yet.

I already tried taking battery out, re-flashing boot.img, and even restoring stock Telstra rom and recovery and factory wiping everything. Still no buttons.

About to try Quasha's method now.

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The links appear to be broken

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Also, where could I find the compatible version of CWM Touch 5.8 or whichever one works so I can flash and avoid this damn problem coming back?

Thanks

---------- Post added at 10:58 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:09 AM ----------

Credit to Qasha for the original fix.

UPDTED:

As you can't get the version of ICS Megamix Qasha used, I used http://d-h.st/Y2g from the page: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1576924

Here I found that my Touch was 0x11 and Part Touch 0x0 instead. I did the FW update anyway.

That chaged my Part to 0x1 instead.

My phone didn't have a psychotic episode, all I noticed different at this point was the menu and back keys were lit up and appeared to be flickering a bit.

Step 7, after doing the 2nd Cache wipe just before restoring my back-up, I noticed it came up on screen "Back button disabled".

At this point I thought, crap now it's screwed again as after scrolling with vol keys, the screen lost all writing and I was left with the andriod robot logo and nothing else.....I persisted with trying and pressed the home button for something different......voila, it came up on screen with "Back button enabled". (I did notice that even after it said "back button disabled" the buttons still remained lit up).

Once that happened, all the writing and options returned to normal (ie. Reboot, install zip from card, Wipe data, etc.).

I then restored my backup successfully and rebooted.

At this point, I did not need to proceed to step 9 as the functions of my buttons had been restored to normal!

Once again, credit to Qasha for the original solution, but I found I did not need steps 9 through to 13.

In my opinion, I think the whole issue is definately caused by that particular version of CWM (5.0.2.6).

If anyone could post a link to a working version of CWM Touch for our phone (Samsung Galaxy S2 4G Telstra GT-i9210T) could they please post a link and install instructions.

Thank you and I hope I helped out.