Hi, i have got a HTC Desire/bravo. When i turn on my phone i get straight into hboot, without pressing anything. The worst part is that the Phone does not respond to volume up or down to navigate in the hboot menu and it does not respond to the sleep key either, so i am stuck in hboot and cant do anything. I previously rooted another android phone and flashed Cyanogenmod on it, so i do have some knowledge about this topic.
The HTC Desire is a nightmare lol, a friend of mine has one and has tried an incredible number of things, but nothing seems to offer a satisfactory solution. I guess it's just not HTC's finest moment. I would just keep it stock, so that everything at least works, even if that is quite inconvenient from an enthusiast's point of view. You can easily root it with stock ROM through the HTC website, and you can sideload a lot of apps with a false indication of incompatibility, and still get the benefit of the greater speed of the stock non-deodexed ROM in comparison to a much slower loading deodexed custom ROM that makes the phone almost always lose some functionality or connectivity. It's still a very nice phone with stock ROM.