A few days ago the home button on my HTC EVO stopped working. The picture to the left shows the recalcitrant button. After a lot of googling and a similar dose of experimentation I fixed the problem. I suspect that this fix will work on any HTC phone, but I don’t know for sure. The problem was that hitting the home button, which is supposed to take you out of the application that you’re using immediately back to the phone’s home screen, produced only a brief flicker. The only way I could get back was to repeatedly hit the back arrow at the bottom of the instrument until the home screen appeared. What was going wrong apparently was that the cache of an application I’d never heard of before was filled preventing the home button from working.

If you have this problem, you can try this solution. Press the menu button just to the right of the home icon. Then press settings. Under settings press applications. Next press manage applications. I know this menu system is insane, but what can you expect from an army of nerds. Next look at the top of the screen. You’ll see four tabs; hit the second from the left the one that says all. Then scroll down (a long way) until you come to HTC Sense, press it.  You’ll then see a white bar that says clear data. Punch it and click OK on the screen that appears – don’t be intimidated by this screen. Then immediately restart the phone. After this reboot your home button should be working again. If that doesn’t work you can try pressing the force stop button just above the clear data bar. You may lose some of the icons on the main screen but the apps will still be there and you can put the icons back. Good luck.