Troubleshoot Reboot Hangs

[beluczywo]

Gurus -- can you help me tell if I have flaky hardware or if I am shooting myself in the foot with some software I'm loading. 3.3, 3.5, and now 6.1 work and I LOVE them. Fresh off of a hard reboot after flash of a simple or maxed out kitchen the device works fine. I run SQL2 for a program that requires it. I restore my PIM. I add in WSync for Verizon. It works fine for a few days and then the device will be dead (not dead battery, just black screen). Reset button gets as far as the 2nd screen (Windows Mobile) and that's it -- full hang, never progresses.

Only way to get alive is either a hard reset or bootloader and new load of SW.
1.02 bootloader
Verizion PPC6700 (Apache)

Any ideas on basic troubleshooting of the bootup process?
Does the device cache "last start" in some way such that if it gets some sort of corruption, it persists through a soft reset?

I'd like to fix it myself but when you can't see what's going on, what do you do to troubleshoot? Trial and error hasn't homed in on much -- it has to run for a while before the problem shows up. I'm about ready to go back to the original OEM 2.7 release (shiver) and run a few days just to see if it stays alive.

Thanks guys!

[bmx045]

Make sure the battery is fully charged, then try to boot it up, I know if the battery is near 10% remaining, the phone will hang on windows mobile splash. I had a similar issue as you and realized the battery life remaining affected its performance. If you feel that a certain program is causing the hang, then weed the culprit out. If I were you I'd leave out all the verizon customizations (reseting within 3 seconds after hard reset boot)

[lightbiter]

if your running a custom rom for winmobile 6 it probably has all the verizon customizations built in so when you do a hard reset don't let the carrier customizations run