I appreciate the quick response. You advice is great, but does not match my symptoms. The camera won't turn on at all when the card is locked, not even in playback mode, so holding the power button for a long period of time does nothing, nor does half pressing the shutter. I can use both of those things to get the camera to record mode when I had a non-locked card in.
I checked the file name, and even renamed it, and still nothing.
I'm running Windows 7, would this make a difference? Should I try to manually install CHDK to the SD card, without using cardtricks? Could that be the problem?
I think that the root cause is that the camera isn't recognizing the ps.fi2 file on the card (hence the failure to autoboot), but I don't know what could be causing that.