Ok here's the skinny on the Safe Mode at least as far as it concerned my wife's Intercept. If there was no problem with the phone, you would ENTER safe mode by holding down the optical mouse button all the way through startup. My wife's ended up ALWAYS coming up in safe mode. So after talking with Sprint folks and doing research, we came to the conclusion that the phone THOUGHT the push button was being pressed during turn on so therefore the phone always came up in safe mode. Sprint tried a factory reset and everything. So we tried to actually USE the optical push button to navigate through some of the apps and windows and it did absolutely nothing. Basically, the optical push button is inoperative and the phone "sees" it as being pressed. The phone also would do things on it's own further reinforcing the idea that the button was being sensed as being pressed. So needless to say, we are having it sent back and repaired thanks to our warranty. Hope this helps...though none of it is good news.