[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] whynotletmeusemyemailaddr:
Troubles with CM on the captivate

I'm at my wits end trying to get CM to work on my Captivate. I have reasonable technical proficiency (Computer Engineer with decent Unix background), and have been trying to get CM to work since about when the nightlies started several months ago.

I have tried about 6 installations since then, about once a month. Each time I used the highest rated or most downloaded nightly/RC of that week. Each time I do a factory wipe and follow the instructions verbatim from the CM Captivate Wiki. I wipe cache, I charge it fully beforehand, I even restore to stock first every other installation, and the last time I even formatted both SD cards (int and ext) so that it was as if completed new as far as I could tell. I start each new installation with the bare minimum apps, and slowly install more over time until I reach my minimum comfortable number of apps, about 60. This helps me to identify any particular app causing an issue. I have only once seen an app cause problems - Skype. The apps are all 1,000,000+ downloads, 4-5 stars, etc. The issues do not happen even a week after installing all the apps. There are few to no FCs until this point.

Instead, all of a sudden about a month in, for each of the 6 installations, I get force closes. As in EVERYWHERE. Every. f-in. where. When the phone restarts (whether a reboot, a power off and start, a power off, battery pull and then on again, etc), about 5 Force Closes (calendar, gapps, Google Framework, facebook, etc seem to be common). Any app I open, same thing. I literally cannot use my phone for just about anything. The dialer works, although I will see several things FC while I try to dial my number.

I thought I figured it out at some point. I realized that I received a notification from Dolphin that my browser cache was full soon before getting the FC epidemic. So I cleared my browser cachem, and the problems went away for about a week. Then they came back full-force, and no cache emptying that I knew to do would help. This time (if you haven't guess this post is prompted by a current epidemic of FCs) I figured what the hell and went into recovery and emptied cache and Dalvik from there. After doing that, the reboot took about 5 minutes, but fewer FCs. For a day. Now I'm back to constant FCs.

I am a big fan of CM, have gotten much benefit from it (a month at a time) and admire their work. So much so that wishful thinking kept me redoing my phone every single month. But I would seriously without a question prefer using stock AT&T over CM in a heartbeat rather than have to reinstall everything every month. when I had stock AT&T, I never had a single FC. I know that sounds unbelievable, but honestly - I was a power user (now I'm much more cautious) and never had a single FC. I probably had 90 or so apps, used it for more than 3 hours a day (more than half on my commute), and not a single FC in about 6 months of stock AT&T.

If you have suggestions, I would be really grateful. I am willing to try mostly anything. However, I am not looking to "try" a new installation. If someone recognizes the issue and says I have to reinstall in order to avoid the known issue, I'll do it. But if someone says, "You've never done nightly 168, have you? I had no problems with that one. Try it!" or "Try the stable one", I'm going back to stock AT&T. Because if 0 of 6 highly rated nightlies (and I think one of them was an RC) gave me the same predictable issue, I am not willing to waste my time even on the stable one if it's just guesswork that it'll work where the others have failed.

Update - A dude on the CM Nightly Captivate forum had the answer that did the trick. To quote him:

To fix the issue, I disabled sync for all of the individual items for all of my google accounts and facebook. Then go and delete the data for each of the items (ie calendar, gmail, google+, etc). Once you have deleted all of the data, reboot your phone and then turn on sync for each item individually, waiting for the sync to finish before turning on the next one. This may clear up your issues, but you may run into another error, in which case, you may have to edit your data on the google server (like a calendar entry). You may be lucky and when you go to your sync options, you may be already showing a sync error. In this case, just disable sync for that item, delete data, reboot and enable sync again.