No problem like this before now. Had n800 about 1 month. It was powered off, plugged in and charging. Then I pulled out the charger lead, as I always do, and pressed the "power-on" button until the blue light outlined the d-pad and the Nokia image filled the screen. Then I released the "power-on" button, as I always do, and expected the boot-up to proceed onward; but the boot-up was frozen at this point, and the expected time bar histogram did not work its way across the bottom of the screen as it always has. At this point, the "power-on" button no longer worked and the unit is now stuck in the powered-on mode with "Nokia" showing on the lit screen. Plugging the unit back into the charger made no difference, still frozen in the "on" mode. There appears to be no other reset button other than the "power-on," so I'm at a complete loss what to do next. I expect that the battery will soon discharge completely, at which point I could remove the battery, but that is only a guess on my part. Thanks for any help

You don't have to wait for the battery to discharge to take it out. Unless you start prodding around inside the N800 with metal implements, you can't do much harm by taking out the battery; it's effectively the Final Reset.

Thank you for the help. I removed the battery as you suggested, then
reinserted it immediately, and hooked the n800 up to the charger. Screen then said "charging." I'm sure that a "hard" reset of this sort requires
a "restore" of the last backup, followed by reinstalling all of the user-installed programs such as gizmo, canola and fbreader, which somehow are NOT backed up by the standard backup utility. Thanks again!

Reset by removing battery worked! System seems to be fully intact after this reset, and I was surprised to discover that no restore was needed from last backup,unlike what happened when I upgraded the OS last wek. Thanks for the help.

The "If you reset me, User, I'll dump everything you've entered in me" setting is a "feature" of Windows-"powered" handhelds.

Basicallly, it's because manufacturers had to pay so much in license fees to Microsoft, that they didn't have enough money left to equip the handheld with persistent memory chips.

Unfortunately, Nokia chose to do operating system updates to the Internet Tablets in such a way that everything onboard is deliberately wiped. The only reason I can see why they do this, is because they often change the innards of the O/S so rigourously that many applications will not work on newer instances of the ITOS. This is not considered nice behaviour in an Open Source ecology and Nokia will burn in the ninth Bolgia of Hell for this.

The other justification for it is it makes support easier: "is your tablet still broken if you reflash it?"

Anyway, there's movement on it being changed to support upgrades (see recent maemo-developers thread)

To which the reply is: "No, but now where's all my stuff gone?"

I know, but how else can I keep my street-cred as a grumpy old fart?

It's not a hard reset, because the N800 is quite different from a PDA. A traditional PDA (Windows Mobile, PPC, and also older Palm units, even my Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 Linux PDA) use the memory (RAM) itself as storage for applications and data. My Zaurus splits the RAM between what is essentially a ramdisk, and application memory. PalmOS doesn't use a filesystem but stores programs and data in databases, which are all in memory (with execute-in-place which is one reason why PalmOS needs just half as much memory as WinMo/PPC), WinMo/PPC works more or less as the Zaurus description but the border between filesystem and memory can be moved forth and back.

When you remove the battery from these devices you lose everything you installed because the RAM keeps its content only under power, and what you get after this "hard reset" is what's installed in what's called ROM (but is really a flash area), and you have to reinstall your applications and data from backup or something. My Zaurus has a small NiCd battery as battery-backup, it's used when I remove or replace the Lithium battery. Some PPC PDAs (Dell, for example) have a capacitor which can keep the RAM powered for a minute or whatever when you (quickly) switch batteries.
Newer PalmOS devices (Palm TX, Lifedrive, T5, Treo 650 and newer Treos) have what's called "NVRAM", non-volatile RAM that can survive an empty battery (the "nvram" is some clever use of flash memory, which makes it slightly slower than RAM but not by much).

The N800 (and 770) instead uses what is essentially a traditional desktop computer setup: RAM, which is only used for running applications and their data, and Flash for storage - when you install an application in the Nokia it's stored directly onto the internal flash, which is like an internal disk. To remove the battery on the Nokia doesn't hurt more than rebooting (with or without power-off) your desktop computer. To simulate a hard reset on a Nokia tablet is essentially to reflash the device, i.e. overwrite its internal storage with the originally installed content (or "image").

There's also another problem with PDAs: A PalmOS device, for example, has no real memory protection between applications, so a badly failing program can overwrite RAM elsewhere, and as essentially the whole system is RAM it can introduce errors that won't go away until you wipe and re-install (hard reset + re-install). But this can't happen in the Nokia tablet, an application can write bad data to disk but it can't overwrite/damage another application, not in RAM and not its executable file.

So, compared to a traditional PDA, the Nokia is "no worries"

(But as has been said by other posters already, the Nokia backup/restore system could be somewhat improved.. as it is now it needs too much re-installation when you reflash.)

Thanks for the great support from all concerned. I learned a lot more about my n800 in the process. And, yes, my previous mobile experience has been exclusively by way of PPC and Palm devices, which is why the behavior of the n800 in this situation came somwhat as a surprise (i.e., memory contents surviving what I thought was a "hard" reset), even while my user-installed applications did not survive the "reflash" last week to upgrade the OS to gregale, nor was the missing software restored when I "restored" from the very-current "backup" after reflashing (an even bigger surprise).

From the user's perspective, I hope that a "fix" is on order, either to a method that merely upgrades the OS (as does Microsoft) in a way that does not affect other installed applications, or at least to give us a backup utility that actually remembers and retrieves one's user-installed applications. Without a solution to this issue, installing OS upgrades becomes more problematic over time due to a growing overhang of multiple user-installed applications.

[Nerdy side-note]

The Newton really was the first PDA that got it all right: It combines a very effective database storage system with non-volatile RAM storage. Users reported MessagePads that had been stored away for several years to boot up with everything intact; only the clock and the touchscreen calibration needed resetting.