G1 Home, Call, and Screen Lock not functioning

Pooky's g1 (my significant other) out of the blue, just started malfunctioning all together. Aside from mysterious ringtone and volume changes, her home and call keys wouldn't work, and her screen did not lock after a set period of time. No new applications were installed recently. She mentioned that her phone did auto reboot after disconnecting it from her PC, and that's when this started happening. We went to Tmobile (why? it was close by, and we thought we would give it a shot), but all they could offer, was a number for the tmobile G1 tech. With the assumption that I would probably spend hours and hours on the phone with a tmobile tech, I decided to google it. Most people who had this problem basically just gave up and did a factory reset. But I did find something interesting on this forum post @ xda-developers.com.

I've had a very similar problem on a development image. If the phone thinks that it isn't activated, then it disables keylock, home, and the call button. The activation flag is stored in a database somewhere, but I forget where. Doing a factory reset and then activating again should fix it (if that's the problem).

The nandroid backup might actually replicate the problem, because the activation flag is stored in the /data partition along with all your apps..

This might not be the problem though!

But in fact, it was! I reset the google account on the phone by going to Settings->Applications->Manage applications->Google Apps and cleared the data. Afterwards, it asked me to sign in as if I factory reset the phone. After inputting her credentials, everything started to work. Sweet!