well thanks for the advice. i extracted hardspl 9 to my desktop in its own folder and ran the exe. my phone prompted me to allow it twice then jumped into bootloader and i actually saw the progress bar pop up this time but then it just rebooted back to windows mobile and my pc gave me the following error:
ERROR [284] : UPDATE ERROR
The ROM Update Utility has encountered communication errors during the update process. The program will guide you step-by-step to recover from the errors so you can continue with the update.
It kind of seems like Vista is dropping my USB connections. Maybe an SD card method would work...Although the HERMIMG.nbh method didnt work.
