Thanks again. Now we're getting somewhere. I did
# dpkg --purge --force-all ovi-startup
and it went fine:



It seems to have removed the executables, but left some configs and libs:



For now I'll leave it as is and see how it goes. If the problem persists I'll try removing libphoneactivation0 too (I'm afraid of removing too much).

Thanks again for the help. This may well fix it.