My thought was that it might be the same underlying bug. Modest wants to connect to servers when it should be sitting quietly, which leads to me seeing connection failures and you seeing desperate attempts at finding a means of connection.

You're probably right though; it's better to enter them as two separate bugs. I only guessed that these two symptoms are related, and marking a duplicate, if necessary, is easier for the maemo folks than splitting.

Thank you for the suggestion, but yes, this behaviour persisted across a number of reboots and even battery swaps. I've since turned on automatic updates though, so while I still see the error messages, they no longer seem out of place.