HTC Thunderbolt Killing the home app?
If your home screen is dying like this, check your debug logs (if you have adb installed). My guess? You're running out of RAM and Android is killing the home screen process to get more RAM.

You might want to stop some services (or root &amp; remove stupid carrier bloatware).

CyanogenMOD and some other custom Android builds will allow you to "lock" the application in RAM, but honestly that can cause as many problems as it solves.

On my older phones (HTC Dream / HTC Magic) the culprit at the time was K-9 mail.