Well, it's all up there on post#25. If you (or anyone) have a N900 with a proper microUSB port (in case something happens) you are all welcome to try what I've posted above and report the results here.

Re. low-power state.. this is the ACTDEAD mode in the N900. When you turn it off and there's an active pending alarm and/or the charger is connected, it will not really shutdown but go into this low-power mode. That's why alarms work when the unit is "off" (although perhaps the hardware allows also waking up from real off state..)

In theory the transition ACTDEAD -> USER mode should be faster than from OFF -> USER.

But really, the N900 boots so fast that the original goal of this thread seems to be now that of removing the dots [ which have an entirely negligible effect on boot time ]