[T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S II SGH-T989] Nizrael:
Hello, everybody. I have a T-Mo SGS2 SGH-T989 that's frustrating me, and I'm hoping one of you might understand what's happening and how to fix it. Its software seems to be frozen in time. Every time I reboot it, no matter what I've done to it, it opens on the homescreen I had in place as of last Thursday (6 September). As soon as it boots it downloads updates for every app that's had an update come out since then. Any apps I have tried to install since then give me a "could not be downloaded due to an error. (492)" message, and any already-installed apps I delete magically reappear unchanged as soon as I reboot. Not only that, but all the app cache data is frozen in time, too; Poweramp opens with the player cued to the middle of a track I had last listened to over Bluetooth in my car last Thursday, the Kindle app opens to a page within a book I had read last Thursday, etc. I can't make any permanent changes to my phone for no obviously apparent reason, though it's for the most part functional. To top it all off, though, after being powered on for a few hours, apps start randomly force closing until I reboot it again! I've been running essentially the same software environment on it for a couple of months, and up until last Thursday it was rock-solid reliable. I'm not a complete n00b, but I don't have nearly as much time as I'd like to devote to progressing beyond rank amateur status, and having my phone not completely functional is bugging the spit out of me. I've been trawling this and other forums as much as I can since then, and I can't make head or tail of this problem. Anybody have any ideas?

I've already tried wiping the cache and dalvik cache, I've tried restoring a backup from cwm, I've tried doing a factory reset and data wipe, I've tried darkside super wiping it, I've tried flashing new recoveries, I've tried to update the firmware through Kies, I've tried to flash it back to stock with ODIN, and I even downloaded the Android SDK so I could open an adb shell over USB and chmod all the file permissions to read/write! I keep encountering error messages in cwm and adb saying error mounting /sdcard, error mounting /sd_ext, error mounting sdcard/android.secure, etc. What really blows my mind is that everything seems to be working just fine in ODIN while I'm flashing it - until the phone reboots and shows me exactly the same environment it had before I flashed it. I had avast! Anti-Theft installed, and I disabled its device administrator privileges and uninstalled it before I made any of these attempts to fix it, but it keeps reappearing too. I'm at a loss.

Device details:

Phone:

T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S II SGH-T989 (rooted)

Android:

4.0.3

ROM:

DARKSIDE.EVOLUTION.3 v5 (out-of-date, I know, but it had been working flawlessly for months, and if it ain't broke....)

Kernel:

3.0.8-perf-T989UVLE1-CL508451 (it says "se.infra@SEI-46 #1" on the line after that in the kernel version block of the "About phone" settings page)

Recovery:

ClockWorkMod Recovery v5.0.2.7 (again, I know it's out-of-date, but if it ain't broke.... and now it won't let me re-flash it!)

Baseband:

T989UVLE1

Selected Installed Apps:

AdFree, Amazon Market, Amazon Kindle, ADWLauncherEX, avast! Mobile Security, Beautiful Widgets, BusyBox Pro, Dolphin Browser, Dropbox, DSPManager, KeePassDroid, Kies air, MX Player Pro, Poweramp, PriceCheck, QR Droid Private, ROM Toolbox Pro, Shazam, Superuser, TeslaUnreadPlugin, Titanium Backup, Widget Locker