Suddenly there are brackets around apps

After a recharge, my ipad 3 (with iOS 5.1) suddenly have brackets around my apps and various locations on the ipad. The way ipad requires me to interact with it also changed. The symptoms are

1. First, ipad is extra sluggish now.

2. brackets shows up on various hot spots that can be "activated", such as around apps, around keypad keys, around browser history...etc.

3. In order for ipad to register me activating anything, I need to move the bracket to the location that I want to activate, and then double tap it in order to activate it. This includes opening apps, entering texure, sliding bar...etc.

4. hold-apps option no longer exist for me, at least no alternative method that I can find. That means I can't close any apps in multitasking tray.

It's almost as if I've accidently enter some debug mode. The problem is I couldn't figure out how to get out of this mode and return to default ipad functionality. To try to fix this, I've tried:

1. Hard reset ipad by holding both wake/sleep button and home button and wait until the apple icon appears and flashes. Normally this suppose to hard reset ipad and shut down all apps. In my case it didn't do much. The weird "debug" interface is still on, and all opened apps in multitasking tray are still there.

2. First backup my ipad, and then do factory restore, and the restore from my backup. The factory setting restored the default ipad functionality just fine, but once I restored from my backup the ipad reverted backt to the "debug" functionality. Another word, it would appear my backup now have this "debug" functionality turned on.

The only way I was able to get out of this was to wipe my ipad to factory default, and manually re-install all apps. This ***** because I lost of all my app data, especially those that don't backup to the iCloud.

So I was wondering, exactly what is this weird mode that I stumble upon and how do I get out of that mode? Prefereably without having to wipe my iPad clean again???

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks!