V0.4 Goes Bad, really bad - Help

Not sure exactly what happened. I made the progression from rooted 2.1 stock to the original Froyo leak. Upgraded to the follow up leak and then to the original BB Froyo 0.1 (I believe). Upgraded to 0.21 and was still not completely happy with the performance. Moved over to Simply Stunning 4.1 and then 4.2, and then back to BB 0.3. While not significantly different, better I felt like each version things did seem to improve, and no issues moving from rom to rom. I for the most part used Rom Manager for all the upgrades past BB 0.21 without wiping.

I have Titanium Backup donate version and had current backups as well as both CW and Sprecovery backups as well. I felt pretty secure given the history and my backups. I should note that I had many/most third party application (without widgets) on my SD card. I used Titanium Backup to move the apps to the SD card for the most part and the stock settings - manage - applications to move a few.

Upgraded to BB 0.4 and everything seemed fine for a few hours. I started having some lag issues so I did a reboot and following the boot I noticed that approximately half of my applications showed up with no icons, hence no applications. Rebooted several more times with the same results, they were no longer on the phone.

It keeps getting stranger, something apparently corrupted something with regard to my applications, my Titanium backup and even my market links. I flashed back to several of my previous backups (both SPRecovery and CW and similar issues, only some of my application show up and even after restoring them from Titanium or market, upon a reboot many of them disappear again.

I assuming my only recourse is to do a wipe and reinstall everything, but curious as to what happened here.

I never did an partition on the SD card, but don't know if that is an issue. I did notice when doing the CW recovery that I get the message sd-ext not found or something to that effect.

Not placing any blame on BB, given the number of rom changes and so forth, it just happened when I was on this particular rom version.

Any help appreciated.

 

Actually I have read many, many threads and am aware of the caveat to wipe if/when issues present themselves, which I intend to do. What perplexed me is why all of a sudden not only were the applications gone, but what was causing them to re-disappear once reinstalled. It just seemed odd to me that inspite of multiple backups, and Titanium installed that I was unable to restore things to a previous stable condition.

 

I was not completely consistent with the backups as I have both simple and advanced, although even on the advanced I didn't select the additional options, so I believe they are effectively simple nandroid backups without the standard naming convention. What confuses me in the past when I did a simple nandroid backup it seemed to me that I went back to that point in time on my phone, only losing the data, application, etc. that i had installed since the backup. Given that experience, I just thought that the restore would put me back to that point regardless of how bad I'd screwed things up. The only variable that I can see here is the fact that I had moved some of the apps to the SD card.