A few weeks ago my N900 started burning through a battery in about 8 hours or less no matter what I did. Several times I noticed the keypad light under the return key and surrounding keys was lit even at reboot. This morning at about 1am I woke and noticed the far right keypad LED was dimly lit even though the phone had been on and charging/charged with the keypad slider closed for hours, although the back light was off.
This keypad LED lighting on the right side is on from the moment I insert the battery.
Is there any hope of fixing this, is this a known issue on the N900?

I disassembled the N900 but didn't see anything obvious causing a short, everything was clean.
Even with the SIM and microSD out and the screen unplugged and removed inserting the battery instantly caused the dim illumination on the affected keys which went out immediately when the battery is removed.
I have left the phone without a battery overnight using an external battery charger so that is not enough reset, as this happens the moment a battery is inserted I would think this is an error in very low level logic, below even charging.

As a side question, does anyone know where to get the screws to attach the slider or their size, one seems to be missing.

So the question is, will a full reflash fix low level issues like this that present the moment the battery is reinserted on an unbooted phone or will I just blow away a over year of customized work and a few hand installed apps that I am not sure where to get.
Opinions, thoughts, and useful links greatly appreciated.

keyboard backlight is also controlled by your light sensor

try installing healthcheck to see if your light sensor is functioning properly.

having said that, the code controlling if the backlight should only be activated when the keyboard is open. health check should be able to determine if the keyboard open/close function is working or not...

hopefully it's just a software issue, reflash as a last resort..

ffffred, I checked the sensors with healthcheck, it shows closed when the KB is closed and the light sensor is operating properly, the rest of the KB lights work fine. In any case I didn't really think that was the issue since it is one edge of the KB and happens even when I insert the battery to an unbooted phone. Is there any way to reset the phone to the point that it clears the clock beyond leaving the battery out for a few hours. Is there a deep firmware that I can flash including say the bootloader but leave my / and /MyDocs partitions alone.

When I flashed my N900 both edges of the KB were lit, which is supposed to happen, is there some mode that lights only the right side but not the left? Issue continues after flashing, though I think the battery drain is just form having old well used lithium cells.