[ironhead65]

So, I downloaded both the kitchen and the provided image. I get to the point of the "Updating the ROM image on your PDA phone", with the progress bar on both the update program AND on my phone. The one on the phone came after the multi-colored screen.
My TP2 is STOCK. As in TOTALLY stock, never touched, patched, hacked, etc. I do not have the Sprint SIM card in it. I took it out to run Android. That was neat, but I don't do that any longer. However, I have NOT put the SIM card back in.
My PC is Windows XP. I disabled the virus scanner, THEN extracted the kitchen. I chose a few things, disabled a few, then hit Create ROM. After this, my PC sat for a while with lots of "progress" (text flying across the screen as it did ... stuff). After a while, another program...a small rectangular box popped up (phone programmer).
The FIRST time I got to this point, XP asked me if I wanted to accept an unsigned driver. It was something like "HTC USB". I clicked Continue Anyway. After this, IMMEDIATLY the program stated that it could NOT connect to the phone. I said OK as the driver was apparently not installed. So, I exited the kitchen and tried the "pre-made" ROM. This I ran "ROMUPDATEUTILITY.exe", which popped up the same little rectangular box. Went through all the steps. This time, my phone went multicolored. After 10 seconds, it went all grey with a progress bar at 0%. My desktop did the same. It sat there at 0% for a while. Nothing happened. Eventually it failed out and gave me recovery steps (thank you to whomever wrote those in!!).
So, I decided to try the kitchen again. This time, I was able to get to the sameplace as the pre-made ROM. Got to the progress bars. I tried a few times, I get stuck there without fail (or with Fail??).
The only thing I can think of, is I missed some documentation somewhere that stated I needed to unlock something, or not having my Sprint provided SIM card is making the ROM update fail.
I'm thinking it's more I didn't unlock something (it seems most people in the thread here have had other ROMS, so maybe they are already unlocked??). Is there any tips that anyone can give me? Is there some kind of unlocker that I needed to use? I've only updated one other phone...and it was using a Carrier provided ROM...so I am not sure if I am missing a step.
Thanks! --Ironhead