I'm sorry to hear that so many Verizon subscribers are having difficulty. I purchased my phone in February and it contained .77. I have performed no OS upgrades until now, but I am using a variety of downloaded applications. I'm using DM 4.7 and upgraded to .160 successfully today with only a few exceptions.
I'm not posting this to rub it in, but rather to show others that they can have success. I followed the great instructions posted elsewhere in this forum. I did not however downgrade DM below 4.7 and did not turn off Internet access on my PC.
I did perform a sync before I upgraded. The only caveats I ran into were as follows:
Negatives - sort of
1. At the very end of the installation, I did receive an error message that indicated it could not restore all of my data.
2. The upgrade did save my data to an .ipd file and recommended I use DM to restore it.
3. I removed the battery and waited a minute or two before I reinserted it. Once the device initialized, I attempted to restore the device using the .ipd file. It ran for a long time and crashed at the very end of the process. I removed the battery, re-initialized the device and attempted the process again, but it crashed a second time. I allowed the device to sync with Outlook instead and I don't believe that I lost any data.
4. I have not performed a *228.
Postiives - definitely
1. The user interface is much more responsive. I have no patience for slow UIs and I consider this a big plus.
2. Internet browsing seems to be considerably improved, even after clearing my caches.
3. I have not experienced any problems with my signal, but I have not left my residence since upgrading the device. I have had 1XEV displayed for about 8 hours now since my upgrade.
4. I have not experienced the reported chirping sound, but I have only conducted one 10 minute call.
5. I have not experienced any of the other profile problems, notification problems, or application disappearances reported by others.
6. I have not experienced any email latency.
So far, I'm very pleased with this upgrade and give it a big tumbsup.

The only thing I hope I don't observe is the reported chirping sound.