3GS Fast Power Drain, USB Recharge Very Slow, Unit Stops Responding

Question

3GS running IOS5
Mid afternoon yesterday noticed the battery was extremely low and figured it was because I hadn't charged it after it had been on the bed side table all night. 
Typically it's plugged into a USB port most of the time at the home office and this was the first time it had not been charged first thing in the morning.
It never fully charged, obtaining only about 70-80% charge before the end of the day when is was removed from the USB.  Woke up this morning and the phone had no charge at all.  It displayed the 'plug it into an electrical source' glyph when the main button was pressed. Plugged it into the USB port it has always used and after reading the forums for a while switched it to directly into an external power source. It's now charging at a good rate.
However, when connected via USB yesterday, and directly into a wall power socket today, the phone emits a bleat similar to the sound made by a USB connection being acquired, but only a single audible sound, not the dual USB type bleats.  It did this yesterday and it seemed to be coordinated with it loosing and reacquiring the USB connection which occurred several times an hour. Now I can't figure out why it's making the sound, but it's doing so about every three minutes and a half minutes, (3:23, 3:27, 3:22).
When attempting to use the phone in any way at all if fails:
- When attempting to make a call, after selecting a contact and initiating the call, it displays 'calling mobile...', but no connection is made.  It never rings through and indicates any other type of response before shutting down. (When testing, the calls are received and answered but no connection was ever made.  Incoming calls are not being received.)
- When reading a news feed it shuts off after a couple of minutes and when re-activated, it has forgotten where it was positioned. 
- When accessing Settings and making changes, it will die, but does remember the changes made before dieing but may be ignoring the changes made.  After deactivating notifications on the few that were being used.  The unit indicated they had been deactivated but notifications were still being displayed.
After each of these occur, the 3GS unit just dies and displays the apple icon for a minute or so during which the phone can not be reactivated.
Have not had any major issues with the unit since I began using it.
Am aware of the current power drain problems after the IOS5 upgrade and did the upgrade on the first day it came out, but have not encountered any of the stated problems before yesterday.  No software updates were authorized yesterday. 

Answer 1

Ok, First off, this is now a concluded matter.  The full restore worked and all is back to the way it was two days ago.  Have no idea what might have caused the problem but after talking with a few associates, one did encounter a similar problem but it required no work to remedy. 
For any reading this with a intentions of using it as a template to resolve problems, here's where I got the information: Using iPhone Recovery Mode