Ok i see people wondering why hard reset before and after an install and why flashing back to stock, hard resetting, flashing custom and hard resetting again fixes problems.
I have been doing some research on that exact question.
As far as i can tell, the differences between windows mobile 6.1 and 6.5 are allot more than just the "pretty start menu" and titanium. Windows Mobile 6.5 handles memory completely different than 6.1
Also, anyone who is a computer geek, not only a ppcgeek knows how file systems work. and when you delete something, or even format you are not in reality deleting anything... you are just deleting the reference to that file and opening the space to be written over again.
On a normal computer hard drive a "real" wipe or format can be done by doing a low level format, or on linux you can dd the drive ex "dd if=/dev/zero of /dev/hdaX"
that essentially writes the entire drive with all 0's making sure you have a clean slate to work with.
and guess what? flash storage is no different.
take this example, I had a customer format their 1gb flash card in their camera the other day by accident. they freaked out because they lost all their pictures, I took the card and put it in a card reader and ran a couple professional grade data recovery programs on it. I pulled 1.5 gigs of pictures off the card.... remember the card was only a 1gb card? some of the pictures were corrupt but the meat of them were still there. None of the pictures were corrupt that she deleted by accident, im talking about pictures that she deleted 3-4 months ago.
think of it this way, you have a cardboard box (Storage) but if you don't know what is in the box, but there is a clipboard next to the box with a list of stuff in the box. Oh look at that you have some old food in the box! So instead of doing the correct thing and removing it from the box you pick up the clipboard, and erase the old food from the list. so cosmetically its no longer in the box, but pysically you can still smell it rotting. LOL hows that for visual. now you know how your device feels.
In reality when you do a wipe storage you are doing nothing but telling the file system you dont care about all those files and deleting the reference to them.
combine the whole problem with deletion actually not deleting anything, formatting not really formatting and the fact that there is also ANOTHER area the device writes to that doesn't get touched by even "wiping" the device or doing a hardware key "hard reset" you can use your imagination of why hard resetting as much as possible, or flashing an O/S that uses the memory differently can save your *** in a bind.
If you want to completely understand why this stuff happens, i suggest you do some reading on what exactly is going on with "ESPECIALLY" windows file systems and how they store files, more importantly how they delete files. And do some reading on why "Data Recovery" works, why you are able to recover deleted files if they are truly deleted.
If you want to read a bit on the differences between memory managment in windows mobile 6.1 and 6.5 here is a link
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=544445
I dont expect the average user to understand this stuff, or even care. Long story long, just hard reset all the time if you are going to be flashing, flashing back to the stock rom is a good thing every now and then if not only because it puts stuff in different places, the more times that specific sector is written over after something is deleted the better.
and lastly, if after reading all this crap, you still think a "wipe device" or "hard reset" is completely cleaning out your device, besides not being able to see the files in the tree, then proceed to
HERE and enjoy your day.
sorry for the long winded response, and if you don't care feel free to skip the post.
Oh wait if your reading this its too late HAHA=D>