[Koga]

Thanks everyone for the feedback. In the end, the light leakage is annoying but the creaking was driving me insane. Luckily, I got the creaking to stop. In my case, the creaking was caused by the battery cover not being the proper depth to make a tight seal with the device (or the device is out of tolerance -- I sure hope not).... I put a small piece of post-it note folded up between where device and the case where the two make contact at the bottom -- and knock on wood so far no more creaking.

Hope this helps anybody with the creaking -- though I think we are going to have to learn to live with it / hope our eyes get smart and start automatically filtering out the light leakage.