(ESN change?) Cellularsouth XV (upgrade WM6.1 first?) replacing dying Verizon XV

[XV6700Dummy]

I'd like to get the Cellularsouth phone changed over and working on the same ESN as my Verizon phone tried to commit suicide and jumped out of my hand. Must have been the holiday blues as I've had it for almost three years now and it's only been lightly dropped a couple times prior.

It's whack now and doing crazy stuff with TM's and even persistently making random phone calls as well as hanging up and cutting out.

I've done the *228 (1 and 2) bit several times and this one is going to bite the dust. Pops up a window wanting to dump some parent radio or some system like that. Looks pretty angry but I keep telling it "no".

So, is it possible for me to transfer ESN's and if so, how?
Would there be anything else required to slip this one right in the the old phones place? If so, what?


If the objective was to have the working one upgraded from WM5 and nary any updates or registry hacks, to WM6 or WM6.1, should I do that first?

The kitchen stuff is really making my head hurt trying to figure it out but at least if this fails and the sucidal one finally stops gasping, I have a few other phones I can slip in it's place. Wouldn't mind having it numbered as one of my ol simple camera phones since I don't use the EVDO at all, just WiFi and it would be sweet if it could be done that way and be able to receive pix/flix messages like a simple verizon phone does and continue not paying data charges.

Either way, not trying to get anything over on Verizon and I've been with them for so long I can barely recall.

Thanks if you can help, I know this is a mess and I'm sure it would have been smarter to have waited for a cherry verizon xv6700 to pop up but this Cellularsouth phone is like new and only has 600 hours (compared to my dying one at 14,000+ hours!!!) on it. It was very inexpensive too.