Flashing did not solve the original problems.
-N900 still drains battery faster than Tera Patrick drains a...
-"Duplicates" of images still appear in Photo list.
-Virtual keyboard still fails to appear.
-Auto-capitalization and text prediction still do not work much of the time.
-Conversations app still closes randomly.

Could a bad battery be the cause of all this???
The phone's not even a year old.