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Upgrades come in three flavors: pre-built, pre-built w/ ext rom, and the kitchen.
All of them use APACUpgardeUt_noID or ROMUpgradeUT (they both do the same thing, but ROMUpgradUT checks to see if the device name in the ROM matches the one built into your phone). The kitchen comes with both loaders, or you can easily find and download them from this and other sites. Some ROMs even come with them - just unzip and run.
Some pre-built ROMs make use of the extended ROM to store more data than will fit into just the standard ROM. These ROMs are more difficult for the author to construct, but only marginally more complicated for the user: instead of just a nk.nbf, you get a ms_.nbf too.
The bootloader (APACUpgradeUT_noID or ROMUpgradeUT) will load whatever is in it's directory, so just copy your nk.nbf and/or ms_.nbf into it's directory and run it. Follow the on screen directions (connect via, bootloader mode (on/off and cassete button at same time as reset - hold them in until the screen goes dark and says Serial or USB on it), click next, wait for the progress bar, click next, clear memory (left and right softkeys at same time as reset - hold until you get the confirm question))
The kitchen process is simple too: Run BuildOS.exe (this let's you select what's in your ROM), then run CreateROM.bat (builds the rom, encodes it, starts the bootloader program). The only tricky part is really running the encoder: you have to select your carrier (check the path!), and push encode.
The only problem with the kitchen is people get overly ambitious and end up in the weeds. If you want to play with the kitchen, your first attempt should be to build a stock ROM: don't change the default selections except to select 1 carrier and 1 theme. Load that onto your phone as a baseline. Now that you have the way of it, go back and start changing what's selected. After downloading your ROM, a white or garbled (even partially garbled) boot screen means you tried to put to much into your ROM - deselect some items and try again.
The nice thing about the kitchen is it's customizable and expandable. Once you get the hang of using the stock kitchen, you can get additional OEMs pretty easily - just unpack into the kitchen OEM folder and *poof* another thing to choose. Createing an OEM is easy to very complicated - read the docs in the kitchen if you want to do this.
There are only two potential trouble areas with downloading new ROMs (no matter how your ROM came into existence): don't unplug or lose power while loading the ROM onto your phone; you might get stuck in bootloader mode. In either case, the solution is to try and reset, try one of the exit-bootloader methods (), try donwloading your ROM again, try downloading a stock ROM from your carrier, repeat until you give up and declare your phone a paper weight. 99.9% of the time usage of an exit-bootloader will work for you. Know what you are downloading - downloading a different carrier's ROM to your phone will likely be Trouble - most assuredly if you're loading anything more than a nk.nbf (CE ROM image) or ms_.nbf (ext ROM image). These phones are pretty tough - they don't break permanently very easily.
In most, if not all, cases you should not let your carrier customizations run - either erase your ext ROM before loading your ROM, or press the reset button when you see the "loading customizations in 3 seconds" message (or similar message). Some ROMs include an ext ROM image - you should let the customizations run in this case (read the ReadMe.txt for you ROM!)
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