Don’t know if this is of interest to you or not. Some rambling about my past few days.
I had a Pearl and just updated to a Storm and never had any of the problems you describe. At that, when I updated to my Storm, it was three clicks and I was done (Outlook sync with redirector, no problems).
Do you think you may have tried to set up with the enterprise service versus the redirector initially which started the process off wrong?
Might be of some interest to some readers here...
iPhone share of U.S. smartphone traffic hits 69%
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2279772/posts
I have a Blackberry Curve 8830 with Verizon. Other than a few minor features I know are in the Curve and Bold, it works great. I even have an 8GB memory card in it and use it as a really good MP3 player.
I use Blackberry Curve, 3 POP3 email accounts setup online with BB, Verizon as my carrier, Outlook 2007 to sync with Desktop Manager 4.7, and Vista and all works like a charm.