IPhone Home Button not working after upgrade to ios 5.1.1

Question

Hey everyone,
I'm pretty sure this is a software failure due to the symtoms the iPhone is showing;
0 - the home button does not work at all when the phone is turned on and running ios 5.1.1, well it used to work okay when i had ios 5.0.1, I upgraded to 5.1.0 and started working randomly, upgraded to 5.1.1 to see if it was fixed with no luck at all.
1 - When locked the screen does sometime light up, like when you press the home button and don't slide the unlock button. but it does not exit apps anytime, I mean it doesn't act like it's pressing the home button randomly but only when the phone is locked.
2- The button does work perfectly when iOS is not running: I can get in and get out of recovery and dfu mode at will, that wouldn't be possible if the button were broke.
3- what else? Oh yea, not really a symtom: Tried the 'home button calibration' several times.
4 - It's not filthy, since I really cleaned it thoroughly with a powerful tiny nozed air blower I got and gave a rubbing alcohol treatment too.
5 - when I shut the phone down it instantly turns back on, I can interrupt the turning on for turning the phone into dfu mode (i'm sure It's in DFU mode because the tinyumbrella log monitor tells me)
I'm now using the 'soft' home button that goes in the accesibility options, but hey, I didn't pay a ton of money for a phone that the same Apple is gonna break down.
It's out of warranty and I don't have apple stores where I live.
I'd downgrade to 5.0.1 in a snap if I could but I'm not into jailbreaking, so the shsh blob thingie is not a possibility.
Any apple dev around that can give me a workaround?
thanks a lot in advance
Added more info ~ 

Answer 1

I had the same problem with Home button not responding after upgrading from iOS 5.1 to iOS 5.1.1 on an iPhone4.   I solved it but not sure exactly what fixed it.   Here is what I did.
1.  Took it local Apple store Genius appointment.   They used a special tool and took some lint out of the connector opening.   The Home button started working.   They said even though the phone was out of warranty, I could buy a new replacement one without a contract for $150. 
2.   The Home button stopped working when I got home.   I got some compressed air in a can and blew the air through the connector to try and clean out more dust.   I now keep the phone with the connector opening facing down in my pocket.   I also struck the phone downward on my hand or other soft surface to force as much dust out as possible.
3.  The Home button still was intermittent.  I then tried to do a hard reset by holding the power on key and the Home button simultaneously for about 10 seconds.  This doesn't work if the Home button doesn't respond.
4.  I connected the iphone to Itunes via the USB to sync the phone.  While connected, I did a Hard Reset by Holding the Power button and Home button simultaneously.  I noticed the Home button responded better when connected to ITUNES via the USB.
5.  I did a backup of the iphone4 by highlighting the iphone 4 while connected to ITunes and right mouse click and selecting BACKUP.    I was prepared to reset my phone4 in iTUNES and restore it from the backup.
The phone worked consistently before I had to do this.
6.  As a last resort which I didn't need to do, I was going to copy all my settings for the iphone by selecting the phone in iTUNES and looking at all the sync settings.   I would then have restored the iphone to original factory settings and then sync the phone using the copied settings.  This would have made sure that the backup didn't include the bug.
Fortunately, I didn't have to do step 5 and 6.   Things started working after Step 4.  So I don't really know if it was the iOS 5.1.1 upgrade or pure coincidence that the Home button stopped working immediately after the upgrade.