problem with homepage display

calguy19

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I'm having a recurring intermittent problem with the home page display refresh after closing some apps. The problem doesn't always occur, but the phone seems to go into a mode where the problem will repeat 6-7 times.

The phone is a motorola droid x running gingerbread 2.3.3. The problem occurred before the Aug 15 update, and still occurs after that update. When closing many apps, the home screen loses all its contents, similar to when the phone boots up. Only the wallpaper and the status bar are present. It takes around 15-30 sec for the screen to refresh, and fill in the widgets, shortcuts, and folders. The problem will repeat several times, each time after closing an app, and then the problem goes away for a while.

Killing tasks with advanced task killer doesn't help. Rebooting, either with pwr button, or battery pull doesn't help either. It acts like the display memory used by the video chip goes thru some refresh cycle for some wierd reason, and keeps doing that until it decides to work ok for a while.

Anyone know what's the story here, and if there is some klind of fix?
 
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calguy19

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It took a while, but I finally figured out the cause of the problem and the fix, which I'm posting, in case anyone else runs into the same problem. I don't consider my Droid a "smart phone". It's a small computer that can also make phone calls. I've downloaded over 200 apps. I organized them, along with the native apps similar to on my desktop PC. I created a lot of folders, and put shortcuts related to each other into those folders: navigation, finance, file managers, etc. I had around 250 apps organized in those folders. It turns out that too many shortcuts stored in folders bogs down the display, and can cause additional problems if the file referencing the shortcuts and the folders becomes corrupt. That file is cleared by Manage Apps, All apps, Home, Clear Data. That will change the wallpaper back to the default (which can easily be reset), and clears out the shortcuts contained in all the folders on the home pages.

After that, I reduced the number of folders and the number of apps going into those folders - only frequently used apps. Then I used the "groups" feature of the app drawer. I created categories of apps for the groups, and "added apps" and checked the apps belonging in each group. Provides easy access to categories of the many applications, and solves the problem of the frequent 15-30 second "pauses" during those home page display resets.
 
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