[Captivate Android Development] littlewierdo:
Regarding flashing back to stock:

The reason I personally do this is to simply get a stock, fresh experience, especially when changing to a different rom.

Most roms are designed to be flashed from stock, they know what to expect regarding how the partitions are setup from a stock rom.

In short, if I want to start over (or start fresh), I flash to stock 2.1, Master Clear via Odin (which seems to be more complete than a factory reset on the phone), factory reset on the phone for giggles, clear all the caches and memories and battery stats and whatever else can be cleared, then go to install the custom rom.

In the case of Cyanogen, doing all of the above fixed all of my force close issues as well as apps not installing because of lack of storage (I install all apps to the default system location, wherever that is, with exception to Audible - that is installed on my internal 12 GB partition because Audible requires the audio books to be located in the same folder as the app - this is a problem because each audio book is around 1 GB for a 40 hour book).

It should go without saying, when I flashed CM over the top of another custom rom (Cognition), I had force closes, random shutdowns, and my ringtone refused to set itself to something audible.

Think of it like a PC, every 6 months, I low-level format all my hard drives, run Spinrite at level 5 (which takes a couple of days) and start from scratch (with exception to my 12 x 2 TB hard drives for just storing things). This keeps all my drives in top notch shape and keeps my PCs from accumulating the usual junk they always do.

The only difference between my PC and phone is, my phone I tend to start over every three months instead of six.

Regarding battery life, buy an app called Autostarts (I think its $2). Using this app, you can control the conditions that apps start under. This is different than a task killer!! Autostarts allows you to see the conditions that every app on your phone will start under and allow you to disable said app from starting in that condition. Task Killers scan the phone every 'x' minutes and kills the specified app, then the app restarts again when the conditions it is supposed to start under are met. This kills battery life (increased processor usage to shut down an app, have the app restart, a cycle continually repeating).

Once you have this app, literally kill every condition your apps are automatically starting under (DO NOT MESS WITH SYSTEM APPS HOWEVER!!) UNLESS it is an app you specifically want running in the background. For example, I have BeyondPod running in the background to automatically download new podcasts, Titanium Backup is allowed so it can run the scheduled app backup, Beautiful Widgets for obvious reasons, Gmail for obvious reasons.

Apps like Google Maps however have absolutely NO REASON to be running in the background (unless you are using the Maps wallpaper - in which case I would say you are a weirdo). Trust me, the biggest problem with battery life is mismanagement of apps. Once you take control of the apps on your phone (set the ones up to run in the background that you want running, disable everything else so that they only run when 'you' want them to - ie. when you manually click the icon to open them), this rom has battery life similar to Cognition (which is probably the most battery saving rom out there).

Regarding bootloaders, I hope to God CM isnt moving to i9000 bootloaders (as in requiring them). I have very strong opinions on this and how the rom developers have been VERY irresponsible regarding these bootloaders... not to mention the amount of confusion they created, quite frankly because they WERENT DESIGNED FOR THE CAPPY! Oh, sorry, I overreacted...