God I hate problems like this...

[Guest dwallersv]

I have a highly customize phone with a ton of stuff installed, reg tweaks, and on and on. It's quite a chore to build it all back up again from scratch.

Yesterday my phone started sucking down the battery like it was powering my town. Full charge to empty in about three hours. Phone was hot, even when in standby.

The culprit was clearly something blasting a continuous stream of data over the broadband connection. Any time I disconnected broadband manually, it would reconnect within a minute from some app asking to connect. Checking through FDC Task Manager I could see the TCP packet count steadily climbing, and from the netstats screen could see a half dozen connections or so, most to two IP addresses that I could not track down to anyone. Hijack? Virus? Worm? Don't know.

It was bad enough that I couldn't charge the battery from the AC charger without shutting the phone down completely. The best the charger could do is just hold the line on the current battery charge level. Backed up the phone, did a hard reset to a virgin config, and verified that all was normal -- charging, discharging, etc. Fully charged yesterday evening in this config, then let sit overnight. 90% remaining this morning, 12 hours later.

Now here's the real weirdness: Before I hard reset, I tried simply turning off the cell part of the phone, thereby eliminating any possibility of broadband, to see if that would stop the power drain and confirm my suspicion that it was massive data traffic (i.e. cell transmission) that was killing the phone. What happened? Some gremlin in the phone turned it back on by itself, connected broadband, and started transmitting again! What? Didn't think this was possible.

Tried it with Flight Mode too. seconds to a minute or so later, left FM on its own and connected back up again! What the hell?

Anyone who has any insight in to this please respond! This kind of scared me a little. Seems very virus/wormish. Anyway, I've wiped the thing and am carefully putting back just what I need when I need it, then monitoring things.

Edited July 10, 2009 by dwallersv

[Guest Adrynalyne]

How bizarre.

List your processes running in the task manager.

[Guest necosino]

How bizarre.

List your processes running in the task manager.

Sounds fishy to me, he edited his post to say he already wiped it clean..

Edited July 10, 2009 by necosino

[Guest dwallersv]

Sounds fishy to me, he edited his post to say he already wiped it clean..

Fishy? Are you calling me a liar?

I took screenshots of the entire listing of installed apps from "Remove Programs"; I backed up the power-sucking system with SPB Backup.

I'll post the screenshots from the installed apps (next post). I'll backup the current config, restore the old one, snap some shots of running processes from FDC Task Manager (give me half an hour on that one).

I'll even make the backup available to anyone that wants to try installing it on their 910 to see what happens (provisionally; I need to see what's personal in there that's sensitive and take it out first).

Why would I make any of this up? Are you just a jerk or something, necosino?

[Guest necosino]

haha, Yes, I am a jerk.. However, I was not calling you a liar.

I was saying that it sounds fishy, like something is afoot that should be looked into. I was then commenting the fact that you had already wiped the phone, so whatever was causing the drain wouldn't have been in your running processes anymore.. :D

But yes, please do upload the shots of the programs that you had installed so that we can try to pinpoint what was causing it and keep it out of other Omnia owner's hands ;)

[Guest dwallersv]

Installed apps (this doesn't show a few that are not through a cab, but just copied in place like FDC Task Manager, Notepad, etc.):

I had a ton of junk installed anyway that I played with, and then never really used, so there is a silver lining in this in that I am now forced to clean it up. Still, I didn't install anything new in the last week or so, and this strange behavior just started happening about 24-36 hours ago. No amount of rebooting, etc., would make it stop.

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[Guest dwallersv]

haha, Yes, I am a jerk.. However, I was not calling you a liar.

I was saying that it sounds fishy, like something is afoot that should be looked into. I was then commenting the fact that you had already wiped the phone, so whatever was causing the drain wouldn't have been in your running processes anymore.. :D

But yes, please do upload the shots of the programs that you had installed so that we can try to pinpoint what was causing it and keep it out of other Omnia owner's hands ;)

Apologies... I misread your intent.

As I mentioned, I have a full backup of the "bad" config, and can go back to it at any time if anyone has any suggestions on how to investigate it further. While I've already rebuilt enough of my config (MS3, Coreplayer, and a half-dozen other apps I use all the time and care about) to make it unnecessary to go back, I'm very interested nonetheless in tracking it down if at all possible, so I can share/warn the rest of the community here, and fix it if it happens again without having to resort to Hard Reset.

Edited July 10, 2009 by dwallersv

[Guest necosino]

The only app I see that kind of made me raise my eyebrow was za Telnet. That's an FTP server, right? Maybe that's doing it...

Also, nice to see someone else using SmartWatchM. I have an iVirt, and I love it ;) Everyone's always like "Why do you look at your watch so much" until I show them, lol..

[Guest dwallersv]

The only app I see that kind of made me raise my eyebrow was za Telnet. That's an FTP server, right? Maybe that's doing it...

Nope... telnet client. And a really nice, lightweight one.

Also can't say enough good about zaDesktop as an alternative to WM Remote Desktop Mobile. Lots of good features, and best of all, supports 1024x768 and window scaling (i.e. you can connect with the larger desktop, and reduce it down so you can see the whole thing very tiny but get an idea where something is, then zoom back up to interact). I love it.