[who?]

I started getting backlight problems today, as in the screen will turn off very quickly without my prompting, within two or three seconds of me waking up the device. I turn the screen back on, and it shuts off quickly again. I have the settings to turn off the screen after 1 minute, and I've set up the lock to always go on when the screen shuts off either by my doing or through the timeout. When the backlight is quickly going off like this, though, the lock screen does not appear.

I wasn't doing anything particularly strange when this started -- just playing some music through Windows Media Player and updating the library. Any suggestions? I'm running the December 9 21884 (standard manilla) ROM.

EDIT: I've now soft reset numerous times, and even turned off the automatic backlight settings. The phone starts up normally after a soft reset, and the screen stays on, clock works, data, etc. But once I turn off the screen manually the first time this starts: when I wake it up there's no lock screen and the "quick sleeping" begins while everything else is working properly. Phone is essentially unusable in this situation, of course (after the first sleep).