[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] 7175:
EDIT: Skip to the bottom EDIT for the short version..

Preamble: I searched for a fix to this recently and over the past 10 months and haven't seen any real solutions to this. Most people have probably experienced this issue at some time flashing roms, especially those people running gapps-free Android :highfive: such as myself. A band-aid for fixing this is running gapps' SetupWizard and/or CM's CMAccounts, I started adding CMAccounts.apk to /system/app some months ago to fix this. I was never satisfied with this workaround though since it doesn't narrow down the actual problem, and I really like sticking to the AOSP experience, open-source, no Stasi-esque permissions, and without the need to taint my installation just to set it up (setupwizard does a lot more than you might think).

Using some additional skills I didn't have 6 months ago, I finally isolated the issue to the SQL database /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db, table global, value name device_provisioned. It is set to "0" by default which leads to all these ridiculous problems, and setting it to "1" + a reboot fixes all of these problems for me. Setting it back to "0" + reboot breaks everything again, back to "1" fixes, provision.apk present or removed.. I searched for (sqlite3 dump | grep) lots of other provision and setup value differences... tested this a lot.

!!!BACKUP /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db before attempting this. Use 'busybox cp -p /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db Your_Backup_Location' to copy and keep correct permissions on it. I would do a nandroid backup maybe anyway. This should be harmless or very helpful, but it's a su'd command in depths of /data so ya never know.

A couple simple ways to get this set right since you can't reliably grep'n'sed here: Get a nice free sql-frontend app off fdroid or xda -very handy- and go to the settings.db file, 'global' table, and then find or add "device_provisioned" in the name column and "1" in the value column. Root Explorer has this built in I think. The better way though is to pull up the 'adb shell' terminal remotely or use a terminal emulator from the phone with free && adfree Jack Palevich's Terminal Emulator, Spartacus Rex' Terminal IDE (recommended ...for everything!), anything using a jni_exec java execute emulation command. Also Ghisler's Total commander file manager has a built-in command line for convenient executions (or cool shell-script shortcuts you can make --it was actually the first tasker).

# Enter each command line by line (after '>'):

>su
>$(which sqlite3) /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db
>update global set value="1" where name="device_provisioned";
>.quit
>exit 0

# One-liner

su && $(which sqlite3) /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db 'update global set value="1" where name="device_provisioned";'; exit 0

Then just reboot, enjoy that home softkey that takes you to your launcher home.. your notification bar that displays your notifications. lol such basic s***.

Hope this can help someone else out as much as it did me. You don't have to use gapps/setupwizard to fix it! I also want to make sure there isn't another rogue SQL.db value. (btw if you happen to read this and have a broken back softkey/button, your problem is likely the lib file /system/lib/jni_latinime.so. Thought I'd throw that out there.)

EDIT: Heres an update short version. I added another sqlite value that needs correcting in ROMs without gapps setup bla installed. Run these commands in terminal emulator or via adb. Just copy and paste, they need to be exact.

Check that the values on the right are "1" when you fire off:

su -c '"$(whence -p sqlite3)" /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db '\''select * from global where name="device_provisioned"; select * from secure where name="user_setup_complete";'\'

Otherwise or just to be safe, fire off this wicked one liner(Warning: reboots when finished):

su -c '"$(whence -p sqlite3)" /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db '\''update global set value="1" where name="device_provisioned"; update secure set value="1" where name="user_setup_complete";'\'' && sync && fsync /data; sleep 3; svc power reboot'

Done, 1-2 steps.