damn my N900 died the same way this week. Wondering what's going on!?

My usb connection died a long time ago so I always swapped batteries when they were empty and last weekend after a reboot I noticed my desktop being weird. Some widgets were missing, some others were added (the "Get Started" thing and some that are probably in the factory default settings). Also there were no messages and a bunch of other things were missing or not working (like the email application error loop you mentioned).

After some checking apparently my fat32 partition wasn't mounted, so I tried to do that manually (gave me a NFS handle error). Fsck'ing the partition didn't do a thing so I gave up and just used it a few more days as a simple phone.

Well and two days ago I once again swapped the battery and upon booting all fonts were missing, replaced by squares and I had what looked like a simple GTK theme on the buttons and stuff. :/

My guess here is that the flash memory chip died.