Amy, that's because you aren't doing the soft reset properly. You must press alt, shift, del twice. After the screen goes black the first reset, wait until the scrEen turns white then reset it again. This will give you the same result as pulling out the battery. Trust me. This subject is/ has been mentioned quite frequently on here, so search it out for yourself further if you like. Enjoy.
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Doing a battery pull can actually damage your BB's battery after so many pulls! This happened on my Pearls battery. It started peeling off the outer layer that protects the battery. Then I found this site and got SoftReset. What a life saver!!
Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com
Here's the official word on various resets:View Document
The double alt + rt shft + del is supposed to be the same as a battery pull and same as a QuickPull, but of course the battery pull actually stops all power to your device.