I've found that after a restore of the IPSW to my AT&T contract 3G and a reboot, it appears to never activate. It reports "Waiting for activation. This may take some time." without end. I think it can't contact a tower, although that's a guess. Is this a known behavior? Suggestions?

I have been able to complete a JB of my AT&T contract 3g in simple mode, specifying that I have a contract; with the SIM in place and plugged into USB w/ iTunes running, there is a pause of some minutes while activation is done. Afterward, the phone reports that it's activated and summary info shows up in iTunes. But it still has no signal and the phone shows 'Unknown' as its number. I've reset network settings & rebooted. No joy. Since I'm AT&T and will stay that way, I wonder if I should do a vanilla upgrade, see what happens, then try a JB again.

Yes, the iPhone =is= plugged in to USB, AT&T sim in place, iTunes is running. The 'There is a problem with your iPhone...' message never goes away. Even after pressing the home key. I would have expected to see 'Activating, this could take a while'.

An unexpected Pwnage Tool (on macbook pro) outcome using expert mode for my 3G on AT&T contract...

If I use simple mode, all proceeds by the book, the phone activates from iTunes after reboot from ipsw restore (takes a few minutes). If I use expert mode and leave 'Activate' checked, the phone restores and of course has no service as usually happens when this mistake is made. But if I use expert mode and deselect 'Activate', then once the phone reboots following ipsw restore, iTunes reports 'There is a problem with your iPhone...could be damaged or broken' and the phone displays its emergency screen. I would like to use export mode so that I can deselect the custom jailbreak logos and choose some pre-installed packages.

Suggestions?

A past bog entry pointed out that iTunes 8.2 unintentionally broke ssh-over-USB, hence preventing PwnageTool from being used. The same post mentioned that a 'future' PwnageTool would have a fix/workaround. I have a Macbook Pro w/ 10.5.7, iTunes 8.2, iPhone 3G. Am I able to proceed w/ PwnageTool 3.0? Also, there was an even earlier blog post mentioning that a Leopard update had broken a USB framework, and recommended downgrading the framework temporarily before attempting to pwn or else a restore via DFU mode would fail. Do I still need to do this step, now?