which was probably more of a side affect of updating files used in the unlocking process, than a deliberate attempt to break hacked phones

I don’t see any reason to think otherwise. I work for a software company that does extensive customization work with a commercial asset management software system, according to the needs of our customers. The tools and SDK’s are provided for us to do this work, but often what we are provided is simply not enough to do what we need, so we have to code around the system. Once we get into the core of the development cycle on a new release, we lock ourselves down to a particular patch release of the parent software and do not change, because it is not infrequent that a new patch will break parts of our code. This is not part of any intentional conspiracy by our upstream vendor (in fact, they are often astounded by our ingenuity), it is simply because they have made updates, changes, or bug fixes to a particular file that we have made functionality changes against, and changes in that file break our code. I have no doubt that is the case here. These software unlocks apparently do some pretty extensive modifications to the core software, so you can’t expect it to simply keep working after even a minor bugfix update, much less one as extensive as this one.

Leave a comment if you have one. Let me know how your update to 1.1.1 went or if you avoided the update because you unlocked it.

I have one. I haven’t unlocked it. I’ve been with BellSouth/Cingular/AT&T for six or seven years and don’t have any need to change. I haven’t modified it in any way, and honestly don’t understand the desire (and I’m a tinkerer to the nth degree). I’ve never understood the need to have games and obnoxious ringtones on a phone. Update 1.1.1 went extremely smoothly for me. Just click and forget. Took about 10 minutes to apply. A warning is displayed in large, bold letters before the update warning you not to run the update if you have unlocked or otherwise modified your iPhone software, so anyone who did install it has no excuse whatsoever. They have the right to unlock it if they want to, but Apple is under no obligation whatsoever to support them.