Rooting problem

[Guest carlingmascot]

I've had my hero about 4 months now, it worked great until about a week or two after the official ota t mobile 2.1 update when the phone slowed down to a halt with phone memory very low despite the fact i didn't have many apps installed. This prompted me to want to root the phone and get a custom rom which would hopefully speed things up.

I have done the downgrade and goldcard thing now but have hit a stumbling block in that my new downgraded hero will not download astro/app installer (or any apps) for me to do the next stage with flashrec; they all freeze at the 'starting download...' screen. I've tried everything from multiple attempts downloading via wifi+via mobile network, logged in+out of my googlemail account, left it downloading overnight, hard reset the phone, I've even tried emailing the astro apk file to my phone so i can unpack it from googlemail inbox but that brings up a parse error. Internet works fine+i log into my googlemail account as normal so i cannot understand why it won't install any apps. I have also now upgraded with the ota 1.5 update with improved youtube client but still apps won't download.

Any ideas please? Its incredibly frustrating+I've spent 9.99 on joining modaco now so i want my custom rom!! thank you.

[Guest carlingmascot]

This problem has been resolved.

I can only assume the answer is that when i did an umpteenth factory reset i logged into googlemail in the preliminary setup that appears when the phone first starts up. On previous resets I'd skipped this and logged onto googlemail when first entering the market or opening google talk.