PPCGeeks - HTC Touch Phone/Keypad Questions

Long time lurker on this forum...gotten a lot of help w/ my Treos over the years.

I switched to Alltel service this week and am in the process of configuring the Touch Pro and had some questions about the keypad.

By default when you make a call it replaces the keypad with the phone options or call options buttons. Anyway to tweak that setting? It is pretty annoying during a voicemail call to have to first turn the screen on, then switch back over to the keypad....argh.

Along those lines is there any way to make sure the screen doesn't blank out during a call?

I'm really trying to like the phone, but these full touchscreens just have some idiosyncrasies that I'm having a hard time dealing with. I'm only a few days into the 30 day trial though - I told myself I'd use it for two weeks and then if I still hate it I'll switch back to a Treo Pro (I was using the 800w on Sprint...).

I've got all the tweaking tools...reg editor, advanced config, TF3D tweaking tools..just can't seem to dig up anything within those tools to do what I want.