Smartphone Thoughts: Hard Reset? I Never Asked For That!

For reason that is still unknown to me, my C500 Smartphone attempted to purge its rusty old memory banks on Friday night. The phone is about a year old, and has worked very hard in that time and I have never seen it respond in such a drastic fashion. I was on the way home with my wife, when I placed a call to a friend who we had planned to have dinner with. It was a quick call, just wanted to wish him a Happy Birthday and double check the restaurant that we would be meeting with. After the call, I decided to give the phone a reboot. It was acting rather sluggish and it had been running for at least a couple weeks. All this took place with the phone safely mounted on the dashboard of the car.
When we got home, I placed the phone down at the front door as we ran around and gathered items for the kids. When all of a sudden my wife and I heard a really odd sound. It kind of sounded like the smoke detector, but it wasn't really the right pitch or volume. Before we had a chance to locate the source of the sound, it stopped and the company line started to ring. Odd. Not having much time, I quickly answered and the phone and their questions. Just before I was to hang up, they mentioned that they had just called my cell and there was no answer. (My cellphone is the definitive way to reach me. :) ) Now I was starting to put the puzzle together. That weird sound was my phone. When I got back to the front door, and looked at the phone it was displaying a nice little dialog that informed me about pressing ok to restart and complete the reset process. NOoooo! No matter how loud I screamed it was already too late. The reset was done, and the phone was in it's final restart.

We had to leave home right then if we were to pickup the kids and get to the restaurant on time. My phone was now fresh and new. I had no applications and no contacts, or so I thought. As it turns out, the phone only half reset. Seems a little odd, doesn't it? All my programs, files, contacts were still on the device. However, any personalization and configuration I had done was gone. Time zone - gone, Owner name - gone, Email settings - gone, Data connection info - gone. Gone, gone, gone, no more, nadda. :cry:

I figured that since all the applications where still on the device, I would just run a restore. I'm using the trial version of Sunnysoft Backup, and the latest backup was on the storage card. However, when I ran the restore it failed because most of the files it wanted to access are locked by the phone. :evil: What good is a backup solution if it can't restore?

I was able to get through dinner and the rest of the night because it still had all my contact information on it. However, Now I'm stuck in a weird little situation. Since my SP5m is due to ship sometime soon (1-2 days according to Expansys, which in reality means sometime this year), do I waste hours and hours reinstalling applications or do I just load up the basics and run a minimal setup until my new device arrives? I'm currently working under the second option.

What I really want to know is how and why my device would just hard reset, and why it failed to do a complete job of it? Has anyone else had this problem? Was it something I said?