I did soft reformat it and I am able to transfer books to it via Calibre now. But it still hangs and freezes when I try to change fonts (particularly frutiger neue). I created my own test epub, so it's not a book problem. I'll check for font change hangs, but it looks flaky and unstable. 95% sure it's going back.
Out of curiosity, I'll try to check for signs of it being rooted to see if I've picked up someone root experiment disaster.
I found a thread about a T1 crashing with particularly frutiger neue:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...=207758&page=2
I'll keep testing. It's hard to know if this is standard (bad) behavior for a T1.