I did open the Battery Compartment (six times sounds believable). did so the first time in order to remove the battery to shut down, but noticed different behavior so I fiddled with it a bit to see if I could confuse it into submission

towards the end of my inept tinkering hildon-desktop was killed and I started getting pop-ups showing estimated battery left and a notice that "USB device not supported"

is there a way to log what the stock "lock and blank" is doing? (it has always worked)
The only programs that I use that have a setting to keep screen lit are MaemoMapper and FBReader, and only Maemomapper is set as such. (and I had not used Mapper for a few days)

Thanks for all your work and sorry to add more confusion to your life...
and since I am adding confusion....I use the following to enable Bluetooth when in off-line mode (dbus-send --system --type=method_call --dest=org.bluez /org/bluez/hci0 org.bluez.Adapter.SetMode string:discoverable) yet this only works a percentage of the time (less than half the time me thinks)