help with alarm clock

Droid Eris, recently updated to Android 2.1 OTA. Since that update, I have a bug, but I haven't found any other posts anywhere that describe the problem I'm having.

I use the alarm daily, while the phone is carried in my pocket. Before the update, everything was fine. Alarm goes off, I take the phone out of my pocket, dismiss the alarm and go on my way. After the update, I can't get the phone out of my pocket without the alarm going to snooze. Yesterday I was walking while the alarm went off, and it snoozed in two steps, I didn't even reach for it in my pocket. Today, with the phone in my hand I did the gesture for dismissing the alarm (drag down at bottom of screen), and it went to snooze. In order to dismiss the alarm, the phone has to be sitting out, and I have to touch the screen VERY carefully; anything else triggers the snooze.

This is REALLY annoying. I love my phone, but this glitch makes me want to hit it with a hammer. The way it's working, I almost can't dismiss the alarm at all. My current routine has the alarm going off every ten minutes for an hour until I can sit down and leave it out of my pocket for a while. Any help is appreciated. I don't want to ditch the factory alarm app, because it used to work just fine and I like it (aside from that major bug). I fear switching to an aftermarket app may be the only solution. Any suggestions, anyone?
Thanks.

 

I disabled the side buttons, they're text to useless anyway.

I history another thought; could anothe app be mucking with the touch screen or autowake somehow? I did get an update to Anysoft Keyboard the same day I got the OTA 2.1 update. ??