Sansa Clip+ Freezing with no SD Card in, but works fine with one in it?!

Just as the title says. It’s not mine right off the bat, it’s my girlfriends… I’ve looked up all kinds of different techniques, and nothing is working… The story to start with, was I tried using my microSD card in it to play some music. It has had a tendency not to work because of the “format I guess” that my phone uses, and I thought maybe a straight mp3 player would work… Well, it didn’t… First time I popped it in, it said refreshing library, then it was done, and I tried to check it, nothing there. So I checked the folders, and it said my card was empty, though in the memory it said it could see it and how much was free. So I thought, maybe the mp3s need to be outside of a nested folder and be in one folder only. So I popped it back in my phone, moved the files around, and tried it again, and no luck. So I said the heck with it, took my card out and put it back in my phone, and we listened to what she already had on there. Things were cool… She called me this morning, saying her clip+ won’t turn on… I told her I’d look into it, we tried putting a different SD card in, and it still didn’t turn on. She tried holding the power button down 20+ seconds, and no luck… when she got home, she hooked it to the computer, and told me she can get it to turn on, but it kept freezing at the “blue ring” and not responding… She popped an SD card, and all of a sudden it worked… BUT it’s her phone SD and she uses that card for pictures… She needs to have the player working w/o her SD card in it… she tried resetting it once she got it working, no luck… she tried formatting it (w/o the sd card in), no luck. She tried reapplying firmwire 1.02.15… no luck, she even tried downgrading it to an older one, and then re-upgrading it to latest one… no luck… I have absolutely no clue as to what this problem could be, other than it’s something that has to do with the software, and not wanting to void any warranty, havn’t formatted it through windows or anything, just through the settings menu… Can anyone shed some light on this… It seemed to me as if somehow the database became corrupted, but a simple format that she did SHOULD have fixed that… it’s still doing the same thing. I thought it might have something to do with formatting the internal memory WITH the SD card inside to help it reboot, but should all of this really have happened because of a SD card that it may have not read? Any help would be greatly appreciated, and thank you in advance

Can she format under the Clip’s own settings?

yeah… she turns it on with the SD card in it, then after it loads correctly, she pops the card out, goes to the settings, chooses format, it formats it… then she reboots it w/o the card in it, and it still doesn’t work right… it keeps freezing at the blue ring screen… She did tell me today that w/o the card in, it won’t go into power saving mode, and she has to hold the power button down 10+ seconds for it to turn off… I told her to try formattting with the card in, but she’s scared it would format her SD card… I told her she could use mine, and she got mad saying mine was the thing that started all this to begin with… Which I still don’t understand how it could’ve happened…