My Adventures in Flashing a New ROM

     I rooted my HTC Hero (Sprint) a few weeks after I got it back in October but have not put a custom ROM on it for several reasons.  One, I was very nervous about bricking it, and two, all the ROMs available were either still 1.5 or partially functional 2.x ROMs.
     I have been watching XDA closely looking for a 2.1 ROM.  A few weeks ago they got a hold of a leaked Eris ROM.  It still had a  few things that were not functional on the Hero.  Then I looked on Friday and they had two ROMs based off a Sprint Hero leak.  100% functional. Okay time to flash a new ROM.  This is when the fun (read STRESS) began.
      I downloaded the Fastrec one click rooting method and an Amon Ra recovery image. Rebooted, again and again.  I finally realized that the procedure to access fastboot is different for the Euro version and the Sprint version of the Hero. Finally got into fastboot, selected recovery.  NOTHING.  My phone rebooted and locked up.  Pulled the battery, did the same thing, over and over.  I called it quits for the night.
      New day, I reach out to the twitterverse for help.  Discovered that I had I bad recovery image. I got a new recovery image flashed via terminal on the phone and did a nandroid backup.  Here is where I made a mistake.  Fellow noobs pay attention.  I did the nandroid backup BEFORE I created an ext partition on my SD card.  Thus erasing my backup.  I didnt realize this until many hours later.  I rebooted, put a new ROM on my SD card and booted into recovery.  I installed the ROM and rebooted.  It started to boot fine then, NOTHING, phone locked up.  Not again. Tried several more times.  Still nothing.  Not good.  It wasnt a big deal when I couldnt get into recovery when I had a functional ROM but now my phone is unusable.  I pulled the battery again and booted into recovery.  I put a different ROM onto my SD card and tried again.  25 minutes later, NOTHING.  Not good.  Pulled the battery and tried again.  I discovered I was in a boot loop.
        I getting really nervous at this point.  I know its been said that if you can get into recovery all is good and can be fixed.  But as a noob I was nervous.  It didn't help that my wife follows my twitter stream and was on my case about breaking my phone.  Okay neither of the 2.1 ROMs I was interested in were working.  Phone is not a brick at this point but might as well be.  I decided to go with an older 1.5 ROM that was used by alot of people and try it.  IT LOADED!!  Wow, my phone was functional  again.  I let it sit and charge for a while then decided to try a 2.1 ROM again..  It worked this time.
         I have no idea what caused the 2.1 ROMs not to work the first time thru but they are working now.  I have tried both of the ones I was looking at and settled one one. When I flashed to the second 2.1 ROM it went flawless and was really easy.
        I think I spent about 3+ hours trying to get a functional ROM back on  my phone from the time I flashed the first time.  I want to thank @simms22 and @chickenfudge over on Twitter for helping me thru a very trying time yesterday afternoon.  The reason I was trying to use Fastrec and not the Android sdk was my computer was being tempermental and would not let me access my phone thru the sdk.  I tried changing the drivers but my Windows 7 64 bit OS had its own ideas for what the drivers should be.
        Feel free to leave any comments or questions below.