I love you MohammadAG. You, with your knowledge I can never find on my own.

On a related note, does getbootstate read the R&D flags (if those who know feel that's something I should be able to find by digging into the code or various components, feel free to smack me)? Or something else? Because I know /sbin/preinit has an if-then it it dealing with r&d mode being on, but I haven't looked further; obviously that means something before that /sbin/preinit line checks R&D flags. Which suggests getbootstate would be the likely candidate.

I ask because I'm using pali's opensource getbootstate backport from MeeGo on my N900 instead of the closed-source stock one, and that might be what's letting me get away with messed up strings in the r&d_mode CAL area.

I've also deduced that the reason I was getting freezes was probably NOT the actual string written to CAL being bad, but because I was getting bad strings due to errors in my code, which cause my program to error out before it could run "cal_finish", which presumably made other programs unable to run "cal_init" properly. The reboot would leave cal no longer under the impression it was open, thus 'fixing' the issue.