So I just developed an interesting bug - after a lot of recent reflashes, I was reinstalling everything over the last week or so. A day or so ago I installed FastSMS and FastSMSEvo; afterwords the normal vkb was still popping up (I could've sworn that normally the stock vkb is replaced right after install, but I shrugged it off). I only rebooted about a day later, but after I did, the N900's virtual keyboard stopped appearing (whether stock or FastSMS... yes it's on in the text input settings). Also, FastSMS itself won't start from the app menu.

I have ran apt-get install --reinstall on FastSMS by itself, and both FastSMS and FastSMSEvo.

I thought it might have to do with my wierd keymap arrangement (I have my hardware kb mapping set to "us,nokia_vndr/rx-51(ru)" (see the remapping keyboard page on the wiki, under multiple layouts, to understand why it's like that). So I tempirarily set it back to just "us" and reinstalled both FastSMS and FastSMSEvo again. Same issue.

I'll post back to see what solves/doesn't solve it as time permits.