[indagroove]

Although it's not usually not necessary to flash back to stock first, as WarAxe mentioned it is sometimes necessary. If you are having endless reboots or exceptionally poor/slow performance, you may need to flash back to stock.

I've gotten stuck in a soft reset=endless hard reset loop twice in my past 200 or so flashes. Hard reset would not fix it, or flashing to a new custom rom -- only fix was to flash back to stock. Doesn't really make sense to me, but it does work when you are having incurable issues. It doesn't seem to be a rom issue, as it happens on many different roms, and if one custom rom seems to cause the problem, it's usually safe to flash back to the suspected culprit after flashing to stock (ship).

That's my 2 cents anyway..