This morning I talked to palm technical support who’d never heard of the problem I was describing – perhaps because I mentioned the graffiti issue first rather than the power-on problem. This afternoon I put a link to the problem on the palm user forum and got an instant response.

The good news is that the cause of the problem has been identified. Apparently, when adding birthday details to the a contact, the reminder is turned on it must not span a year end. Hopefully this gets onto the Palm OS developers radar as an issue that needs to be fixed.

The really good news right now though is that I know exactly whose birthday record is causing the problem (EmmaB, you have caused me several hours of head scratching with your Jan 5th birthday and my 7 day reminder; please change your birthday to later in January!) – so my Palm T5 will shortly be fully operational again.

Oddly, nobody else had mentioned the Graffiti issue, just the fact that the unit was powering on by itself. I’d just been closing the palm and pocketing it, so I’d not noticed the power issue until much later, it was the graffiti problem that was most immediately obvious to me.

Update: After hotsyncing from my backup data and reducing the Jan 5th reminder to three days instead of seven, the T5 now works perfectly.