ReadyNAS 316 LCD/Touchpanel issues

StephenB, thanks for the follow up on community etiquette.  I'm glad to know I wasn't committing a faux pas.

Concerning the issue at hand, it turns out that it is not limited to the OS 6.7.0 unit after all.  After a sufficient number of power cycles, the brand-new RN31600 unit running OS 6.6.0 has shown similar symptoms.  There has been no significant change to the output of `dmesg` on the OS 6.6.0 unit, though, so the issues found in the log files for the 6.7.0 unit are most likely unrelated.  (I'm still worried about them, of course, so I may start a separate thread about them.)

In addition to the "panel-LEDs-stuck-on-and-touch-panel-unresponsive" state that was seen on the 6.7.0 unit, sometimes the 6.6.0 unit will get itself into an "inverted" state.  The touch panel works somewhat (the OK button is almost impossible to press at these times) but the panel LEDs function in a manner opposite to how they should.  They stay lit at full brightness until you touch a button.  When you touch a button, that LED goes dark.  While you are touching the button, the LED behind the "Netgear" logo normally flashes on and off rapidly, too.

One other thing that I have observed on boots where the touch panel gets messed up is that right after turning on power to the unit, the LCD panel will often quickly display the "Shutting down...Goodbye" message.  The LCD then blanks and displays the expected "Booting" message.  I believe that this is due to the residual charge in the unit keeping the previous data "alive" in the touch panel hardware.  My current working theory is that the touch panel hardware is not getting initialized properly on boot, and that this residual charge may contribute to (but is not the sole cause) of the touch panel/LED problems.  As such, I've found that another useful workaround when the issue arises is to shut down the machine and remove any residual charge from it.  A simple way to do this is to:

1. Gracefully shut down the unit via the web admin page or by pressing the power button on the front of the unit twice.
2. Locate the master power switch on the back of the unit, and flick it to the "off" ("0") position.
3. While the master switch is still off, press and hold down the power button on the front of the unit for 30 seconds (to be safe).
4. Flick the master power switch on the back of the unit to the "on" ("1") position.  The unit will automatically begin booting.

On both machines, ALMOST every time this fixes the problem with one power-drain reboot.  Only once, I had to do this procedure three times in a row on the OS 6.6.0 unit to bring it back to a fully normal state.  Each time the touch panel got more responsive, progressing through the "inverted" state to normal working order.  (This is one reason why I do not think that old data being held in place by the residual charge is the sole cause of the problem.)

Obviously there are still many unanswered questions, and I would love to hear any further input or ideas anyone may have. Admittedly, I may be completely off-base in my line of thinking, but hopefully this post will be of some help to others.