Good news, a night's sleep helps the brain. I got it back booting OS again with the sprint image that includes a radio. It's not the 'right' radio, but it's a radio so I'm back on the wagon again.
http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=21167
Thanks for putting up with me. P.S. I underestimated my previous post "1000" should be more like "10000" since some single threads I've read have 1000 posts all by themselves.
(NOTE: The link to the sprint image is currently broken, but surfing around the FTP site gets you to a file with a truncated name that you can just add ".exe" to the end and it's 'fixed').
Edit: oh hey, that silly FTP site seems to have write access (hence the subdomain "up" I suppose), so I think I've fixed the link. Seems like a public upload directory should have write access but not 'change' access...