Is this in SPRecovery? If so, dumb question, are you allowing the update.zip before installing the update.zip? That's tripped up a lot of people, so it's the first question I ask and I really don't mean it to sound like I'm calling you stupid -- your first post proved that you weren't.
Haha - no, I'm not quite that clueless, and I have been at this for so long at this point that I actually spent a couple of hours one day just going through things step-by-step to make sure that I wasn't just making some MORON error like that, because lord knows we've all been there before, and it's the worst feeling in the world when you finally figure out what's been holding you back.
But I can actually totally see how a smart person could do something dumb like that without thinking twice about it. I've done it more than once while hacking other stuff (bricked an iPod 2G trying to get it to play FreeCiv... man, that would have been awesome if it had worked!), and I'm sure all of you have also. It's part of the learning curve that makes "hacking" (I sort of hate that word... like I'm a crazy "hax0Rz!!!" or something, but I guess it is what it is) so much fun.
The word "hacker", btw, always makes me think of the Angelina Jolie movie, which is completely absurd, but I've found that EVERY COMPUTER GEEK absolutely loves it, and it's not just because Angelina gets topless... it totally captures the nerd-compu-lust that was so prevalent in the late 90's and early 00's, where every MHz mattered, and every new upgrade gave you a tangible performance increase. Remember those days? I remember my first PowerPC processor, a 400 MHz G3 that seemed so goddamn fast - after years of garbage 680x0 processors in the Performas and Quadras of my youth - I thought my eyeballs were going to bleed. I was playing Marathon 2: Durandal, and I remember being able to run it full-screen with no slowdown,, and I was so happy I almost cried.
I'm trying the Terminal Emulator / Multiple phones - root them, unroot them method right now. I kinda like the idea of rooting the phone without using a computer, and the simple fact that there's a UNIX terminal emulator available for my phone is one of the main reasons I love this friggin' thing so much in the first place. Is there a Terminal Emulator available for iPhone? I don't know, but for some reason, I doubt it. Doesn't seem like something Apple would allow, especially with their whole file architecture being UNIX-based. I don't think they'd want the average user having that much access to every part of the phone.
I guess I don't know for sure, I never could stand using an iPhone long enough to get that far. It's a shame, it's such an elegant piece of hardware and the software, and it COULD be great with such little changes (I love the full version of OS X that iOS is based on, for example, but why'd they limit the multitasking so much in iOS 4? Seems dumb). Android is better just because of the ideology driving it... Android users are constantly pushing the boundaries, exploring, etc. I mean, seriously... how many iPhone users do you know of that would spend the amount of time and energy that I've clearly spent trying to root my Droid on their iPhones? It just wouldn't happen... it's not built to be that kind of system. It's more of a, "buy what we sell you, it works pretty well, looks pretty, and we'll update it often enough to keep the average user satisfied" attitude, and Android users have more of a Chuck Yeager, "I want to break the f#%king sound barrier, just BECAUSE IT'S THERE, DAMMIT!" attitude.
My $0.02, anyway. Astro, Terminal Emulator, and rageagainstthecage are all downloaded, so I'll be back in 10 or 20 minutes and let you know what happens.