Inspire won't boot unless I pull SD and SIM

[Faxon]

In addition to not booting unless I remove battery to turn off the stuck boot screen, I have to remove and reinsert the SD card and SIM.
When it boots, all my GOOGLE apps don't work.

I cannot do a master reset, because the phone won't do it, from Settings, or from a "power button/down volume" attempt. The phone WON'T reset.
I tried the "recovery" method from the "vol up/power" screen, and it won't do that, either.
I wiped the cache.
I would happily load corrective software from the SD card, if I knew what to load, where to get it, and how to do it.

I pulled the SD card and formatted it to see if it was OK, and it is. I got a fresh SIM from ATT, and, of course,they don't have a clue about the problem.

Right now, the phone is booted, and the phone portion works fine. I get all kind of error messages about Google Apps when I try to run certain apps.

What I would like to do is simply reset the thing to factory defaults. I would be happy to root the phone if that would make it work, but I can't find a SIMPLE explanation of how to do that.
I don't want to throw this phone away, I like it, and hope I can fix it.

 

[Faxon]

Finally determined the seven vibrations (did I not mention that?) indicates a bad motherboard. I wasted hours on this problem. Going to buy a Samsung today, and never buy an HTC again.