Phone locks when receiving a call

OG Droid with Liquid Smooth 3.2 (same problem with 3.1). I haven't tried many other roms, so I don't know if this is a problem with my hardware (the phone is refurb and only 1 month old) or if I installed something that is breaking things.

The issue: If I receive a call the phone will allow me to answer (move slider) but then lock so that the call is in speaker phone mode (or at least very loud) and I cannot control anything on the screen. The power button will turn off the screen, but that's it. The other person apparently cannot always hear me, so I don't know if the mic is working at that point. If I let the call end, the phone does not recover. The only way to recover seems to be to pull the battery.

Last time this happened, the caller could hear me so I let the call end. After a minute or two, com.android.phone popped a force close message. A minute later, another app popped a force close. It did not recover even after an hour or so. Battery reset worked.

This issue is not consistent. It occurs maybe 1 out of 20 incoming calls. I had the issue on LS3.1, so I upgraded to LS3.2. Same issue. I can try another rom (CGM7.x), but I really like LS so I'd like to see if there is a resolution.

Is there a log mode I can enable to see if something consistent happens when the phone locks? I have a task killer installed. Could that be an issue? I'm not doing anything that I would have thought could be considered challenging for the phone (answering a phone call), so I'm not sure what to check.

In general, this happens when the phone is just sitting there (nothing but the regular system stuff running essentially). The last time this happened where the force close messages appeared I had the web browser open. I hadn't considered ram, but that's a good possibility. I do have Advanced Task Killer running as a service, so perhaps that is related.

With ATK non running, it says I have 115MB used/64MB free. 15MB of this used memory is for settings.
With ATK running, it claims 68-79 free (it's set up to kill tasks since I was worried about memory hogs originally).

I'll look into Steeldroid. Like I said, this is a new phone. What I didn't say is that my wife got it for me to see if I would use a smart phone (was on an old lg texting phone before and this thing is physically much larger). She got it for super cheap, so if I have to go with something different, that wouldn't be the end of the world. If that were the path forward, can you recommend a couple good options with full slide out keyboards?

Thanks!