...yea, flash a 2.1 ROM. SOLVED!

Both issues will likely not be addressed with a soft fix, so I highly doubt one of us is going to stumble upon some magical setting that rights everything.

EDIT: to be more helpful...both issues can be worked around, but the work arounds might not be "acceptable" to all users. For ringers, my ringers work fine for the most part [maybe im lucky], but you can set the device volume to vibrate and the phone will vibrate on all incoming calls. The black screen issues seems to happen less frequent if you keep your device from shutting down it's screen. That's not to say it fixes the problem, but most users seem to be reporting that not letting the device go to sleep helps...which makes sense, since waking the device up seems to be the issue. And it "seems" to be isolated to the 23xxx build, but I can't say 100%.