Cant delete text messages and battery draining on 3 different iPhone 4s

I support about 250 iPhones in a large school board. I have three today reporting that they cant delete text messages. When they try and delete the message the delete bar appears and then disappears before you can touch it to delete the message. The one phone I examined was running iOS 4.2.1 and had recently been synced with the users iTunes. I cant speak for the other two. The other issue is that the phones are draining their batteries within five hours even with minimal use. One user was complaining that the phone is also hot to the touch. Its strange that this issue has appeared out of nowhere on three separate phones. The only common change is that our corporate email system that the phones sync to is off-line right now so the phones may be searching for a non-existent server every hour and draining power that way, but its not a wide enough complaint for me to consider it a factor. My phone is setup the same way and is fine. All three phones are iPhone 4s.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
MacBook Pro 2.9Ghz Intel - 4GB 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drive Mac OS X (10.6.1) 32GB iPhone 4 & 64GB WiFi iPad