Hey Guys!

I think I 'm in big trouble. I modified some XML to create a custom homescreen and copied it over to my phone. When I went into Settings and selected the new homescreen, the phone started to load it and then froze. Now I'm stuck. I tried to copy a 'known good' homescreen over to the phone with the same name as the bad one to see if the phone would load it when rebooted. When rebooted, the welcome screen comes up and then a blue bar comes up across the top of the display with the word (not the button) 'Start' on the first line and searching on the second line. The rest of the display is what is left of the welcome screen. I tried removing the battery and doing a hard reboot, no luck. Any suggestions on how to get a default homescreen to load when you can't even get to the Settings menu to change anything?

what you need to do is a Hard Reset. Hard reset means: all settings, all contacts, all installed programs - everything cleared and reset back to initial factory state.

Before you do that try a simple power cycle of the phone. If that doesn't work then yes do what muchomorek said, a hardreset. You will loose all your data as he indicated. But if you sync with Exchange or Office Outlook you will get all your contacts, tasks, email, calender apointments (if you choose to sync those items to the phone when you set up your partnership with ActiveSync) back when you sync your phone.

Thanks for the replies Omega and Mucha,

I ended up having to flash the ROM to get things back running again. Bummer! I had tried cycling the power, removing the battery, etc to no avail.

One other suggestion from another forum that I didn't try was to delete the *.hif files from the Home folder and rebooting. It was explained to me that the *.hif files are the cached homescreens that get reloaded on a reboot. Eventhough I was able to connect to my phone via Activesync and replaced the corrupted homescreen file with a 'known good' version of the same name, the theory was that my phone may have been repeatedly trying to load the bad homescreen from cache.

I'll try that next time (hopefully there won't be a next time!) But since I can never leave anything well enough alone, I'll probably crash this thing again!