So far I haven't found any consistency, which makes me lean more to a hardware problem. I install a few things, reboot, and repeat. When I find a batch that seems to cause the problem, I hard reset and start again. Once it did it again before I got to that point, and another time those same apps installed fine and another batch further on caused it.
Before this problem surfaced, the last CAB I had installed was on the 6th, and I had rebooted a few times between then and when I tried Google Sync. I'm wondering if a hardware problem would only show up on random reboots.