I learned the hard way this week NOT to ever use anything but the OTA again... LOL
I did the manual non-rooted update and it crashed my phone. After 2 hours of reboots and master resets, nothing helped. I called VZW and they sent me to a corporate store. They tried to override the system and it crashed on them as well. They sent me a refurb and told me the refurb would already have 2.2 on it... WRONG! Another bricked phone. Called tech support... they walked me through a gazillion steps...
What we ended up finding out that my original phone was fine... the manual update though somehow corrupted my microSD card and it caused all the freezes and uselessness. I went to VZW and they replaced my SD card... all is well again!
I'll stick with the OTA updates from here on out... I'm pretty technically savvy, but this was more time than I was willing to spend on an update overall...