Fixed!

You will notice from the EXIF data that this is not my camera, or one of......

Son number one dropped this Canon Ixus 100is and it then refused to wake up, nothing, not a dickie-bird.

So, he gave it to me to play with.

After looking on some Canon Fora [?] I saw that quite a lot of these episodes happened to folks and the usual suspects were the door and battery micro switches. Sure enough the door switch looked odd and it appeared to have sheared off.

How to get the camera not to care if the door was open?

I lost heart for a week or two until today, when I realised I would lose nothing by getting some fine tool into the switch and broddling about. The switch may have been forced in and not off.

Out came the school dissecting kit. A dissecting needle did the trick and out popped a tiny switch body.

It lives!! To prove it here is my 40 year old dissecting kit (with a few later additions!!)

I suppose he will want the camera back now?