Thanks again. Now we're getting somewhere. I did
# dpkg --purge --force-all ovi-startup
and it went fine:



It seems to have removed the executables, but left some configs and libs:



For now I'll leave it as is and see how it goes. If the problem persists I'll try removing libphoneactivation0 too (I'm afraid of removing too much).

Thanks again for the help. This may well fix it.

As a follow-up, the solution suggested by nieldk indeed got rid of the cherry errors. However I'm still getting reboots of some other nature.

They happen often enough to make the phone unusable. At this point I'm suspecting some hardware problems.

I found some sources for applauncher on gitorious, and it seems that the "Daemon: Boot mode set." message does not mean that the phone is booting. So the whole premise of my investigation here may have been wrong. It's not the missing cherry state that was causing the reboots. Something else must be amiss. Given the troubles I had when I flashed this phone it seems to be likely a hardware problem.