[General Questions and Answers] geek4414:
[Q] HTC Desire "appears" as if it has the home button stuck, since a recent update

One of our HTC Desire is exhibiting very weird behaviour since a recent update (couple of days ago). It only affects one of the phone, the second one is working fine, both were updated within the same day.

** I will try to post the software version on the next post, I think it's triggering the "No outisde link for new user" error, even though there is no outside link!

This phone only started playing up about a day after the update, not immediately. It sometimes wake up on its own and bring up the "Recent Apps" screen, as if you have long-pressed the Home key. It then switches wildly between that screen and the zoom out (helicopter view?) view of all the home screens. Initially I thought it is hardware problem and the phone is 'screwed' but I think it's more software problem, since it can work normally sometimes.

The wild screen switching made it impossible to use the phone and because it is working constantly, it gets hot and drains the battery. The problem started to get worse when we plugged it into a PC to sync and it started to go crazy. Since the screen switching so wildly, I can't get into the menu to soft reset or turn off the phone properly. So had to hard reset it, and done that more than half a dozen times.

We did have an issue when we first downloaded that recent update, both phones didn't have enough space, so the install crashed out. We freed up more space and both phones appear to have installed the update fine. Well, until a day or so after, one of the phone started playing up.

At the end, I found that if I held down the optical cursor button (very hard work), it seems to hold off the wild screen switching. I can then sort of use the phone as per normal, so that I can join WiFi and change settings & install apps etc.

I noticed that the Rosie Utility is always showing on the "Recent apps" screen. I've never seen that on a normal "Recent Apps" screen before. Not knowing what it was, I googled and learnt that it's the SenseUI. I then compared the SenseUI info with AppKik and the crazy phone is showing a different size 1.9MB (laterly 2.0MB) whereas the working phone is showing 3.0MB, althought both said HTC Sense Version 1.0 com.htc.launcher.

So I figured something must have gone wrong with the SenseUI Launcher and hence it's doing crazy thing. So I downloaded couple of other launchers, LauncherPro and ADW Launcher. They initially seem to work then all of a sudden the crazy screen switching will start and they will get worse. It seems worst if I left it on the main home screen, if I was in an App, it sometimes stay calm for a while.

In frustration, I thought I will backup my SenseUI (rosie.apk) from the working phone using Appkik and then install it on the faulty phone, but the install failed. Probably because it's being used. Tried switch the default launcher to LauncherPro, still the same. May be it needed Root access to replace? So I rooted the phone with UnRevoke3 (after a long struggle getting the correct ADB working) but still can't install the rosie.apk.

Anyhow, after rooting the phone, it mysterously settled down. I could use the phone normally for quite a while, then it started again. Although not as crazy and only intermittently. Haven't used the phone later part of today, so not sure what it's doing at the moment. When I tried the phone this morning, I stumbled across an option to un-update the senseUI, so it's now supposedly switched back to the factory default (Eclair 2.1??) version? The info from Appkik is stil lthe same though.

My question to the experts are ...

1. Can I 'update' just the latest Rosie.APK since the phone update said I already got the latest and no more updates available. ? If so, where and how?

2. If not, can I download a working copy of Rosie.apk from somewhere, and how do I write that over the existing 'possibly' faulty version?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.