My Phone Sorta Bricked Itself, Any Ideas?

Question

So here's my odd string of events. About a year ago, a good customer of mine gave me his 1st Gen iPhone when he got his 3G phone. This was very nice of him, although the phone wasn't in perfect condition. The back was a little dented and the hold button had stopped working. Hold button meaning the button on the top of the phone. Also called power or sleep. You know the one.
So I used the phone for a long time, and except for the fact that I couldn't make phone calls (THANKS AT&T!!), it was good.
I decided to refurbish the phone, so I went online and bought a new rear panel (that was red!) and a new hold switch, which also includes the volume buttons and headphone jack. Well turns out the panel I got was not complete, so after popping the phone open, I had to put it back together with the original parts. I had to pop open the phone before I ordered these parts too, to make sure I was getting the right part number for the hold switch. So at this point the phone was open twice.
So I was most frustrated and returned all the parts.
Few months later (last week) I decided to do it again, the poor physical condition of my phone was really starting to annoy me. It was all for the better, the parts were much cheaper. So this time around I got a blue rear panel, and this one was complete. I got a new hold switch, new antenna cover, and a new chrome bezel. The chrome bezel was messed up and I threw it away and kept the original. The cover seemed to be perfect, as was the hold switch. So I took the phone apart, and installed the new hold switch in the blue case. This required taking a bunch of screws and one physical switch from the old case.
So the repair came out well, the phone looked pretty tight, and all was well for a little while. Shortly after this upgrade, the phone started to randomly not function, claiming that it needed to be restored. Then you'd reboot it or just wait it out and suddenly it would start working. Then sometime it would say the SIM card was invalid. Then it would go away and work. So it kinda got stuck on the no sim/emergency calls only mode. At this point I figured ok, i'll try to restore it. But the restores haven't worked. They would freeze at the same point (about 75% through) in the process. Then the screen starting to have flickering problems. I kept trying to do restores, the screen flickers got worse, until now the screen hasn't lit up in days. Keep in mind these weren't hardware flickers, like a bad backlight. These were more like graphics card flickers. So now I'm at the point where I can restart the phone and get it to show up in iTunes, in restore mode. But every restore fails with errors like this:
The iPhone "iPhone" could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (#)
Note the # above, that's there because the number is always different. I've seen 9, 25, 1602.
So this whole process has been over the past 4 days. It's very weird the way the phone worked at first, then seemed to get progressively worse by the hour.
Thing is, you really don't even touch any raw electronics when you do this. There is one surface mount connector to attach the hold switch ribbon. But everything else is still contained within the phone, under shields etc. It seems very unlikely that I could have done anything to fry the motherboard. And how would it get worse over time, its very very odd. One thing I did was switch back to the original hold switch, just for the **** of it. But that seemed to have no effect.
So now I have my SIM card in a $10 gophone so I can at least make calls. And my iphone... it's screen hasn't even flickered a single photon in about 2 days. It does sporadically show up in iTunes, telling me it's in restore mode and has to be restored. But every restore fails. Today it even tried to restore with iphone3.0, but no luck.
Oh I also tried removing itunes and the apple mobile device extension, and reinstalling them. It had no effect. I've searched the web and come up with lots of small solutions like change the usb port, restart the computer, etc. None of those have made any changes at all.
So it sure sounds like the phone is dead. But I don't have the money to replace it so I'm really hoping someone has SOME kind of trick up their sleeve that might bring this phone back to life!?

Answer 1

Amazing!
After 100 failed restore attempts, restore #101 worked. Now the phone is fully restored and running OS 3.0. With one problem, the screen never came back on. The phone is fully synced with my music, I can call it and it will ring, I can hear it checking my email. But no screen. No light from the screen and from what I can tell, it doesn't seem to be accepting touches on the screen either.
Last night I took the logic board out, and reinstalled it, making sure all the connections were firm. It still failed at least one more sync after that, maybe two. Then it did it's thing.
What do you think of this now??