Alrighty then....sucks-*** ("success" for those of you who don't speak Sarcastic-ese).
I think the kicker was that Sprint carrier file replacement EVEN THOUGH I'm on Alltel.
I followed the instructions to a TEE, made the carrier change within the PPCK to Alltel instead of in notepad, cooked 'er up, and VOILA! Booted right in.
23.79 free w/ Manilla2d (from Scott's R4RKitchen THANKS SCOTT!)
Just for completeness, lemme recap what I did:
-First, got the NueRom UNIFIED kitchen. edit:
www.nuerom.com, pitch a few bucks & get a login, Downloads page three.
-Made a directory in the "Kitchens" dir called "NueRom" and put all 9 dirs from the Unified kitchen in there.
-made ALL the changes REQUIRED FROM PAGE 1
-Opened the kitchen, selected MY carrier, my stuff, left the Nue-stuff ALONE ('cept the nueFonts addition
)
-Cooked, ignored several GUID Dupe errors, and loaded via USB.
MANILLA USERS.....
FOr those who like M2D, I got Scotts OEMs for M2D-Scott, M2DC, and Extra Themes from his R4 kitchen's OEMs & put them into the User-OEM dir; they showed up under Manila3D & load just fine.
Thanks Mikee & puff for responding directly to my stupid questions WITHOUT rolling eyes, and the rest of uze-guyz who posted symtoms & results that filled in the story.