if you are willing to do another factory reset (and dont forget to disable the personal-lock-screen if you use it), then you just want to run the exe file - i have not seen an actual zip file but i imagine that it is somewhere within this exe...
http://forum.smartphonejunkie.com/f490/team-htc-hero-sprint-stock-rom-development-1-29-651-1-a-193600/
basically, it is a simple windows-program that will reflash your hero to 'stock' - i think i used another version of this file/directions from xda or somewhere, but this is the first result i got from google just now and it looks fine...
once youve flashed up to 1.29 then you can do what i did - namely, setup all the niceties that i wanted to and some email accounts and the absolute-minimum programs from market (for me that includes a flashlight and ghost-commander, not a task-killer nor my paid-backup-program)... if you are lucky, like i was - then phone will actually start sleeping and stuff normally (i did not activate bluetooth even)... after the initial-setup is complete, then i went ahead and rooted my phone (btw - you might want to make a backup of the default-recovery-image see http://android-dls.com/wiki/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Unpack%2C_Edit%2C_and_Re-Pack_Boot_Images)... next, i flashed a nandroid-capable recovery-image and did a full-backup... thus, i had all the pieces to return-to-stock at the 651.1 level if necessary... basically, i followed the steps in http://geekfor.me/faq/how-to-root-the-cdma-htc-sprint-hero/ except just-before Step-9 i did the backup of the recovery-image... if you understand what/why you are typing these commands - and are careful, then this truly is an easy process to do... if you are not interested in rooting and backing-up your phone then skip this whole previous paragraph...
ok, once that is all done - then you can either play with 651.1 or upgrade to 156.2 or whatever you want... i feel secure in the knowledge (having a nandroid backup that is complete) that i can undo anything that i break with my phone now... btw - post-upgrade, you will need to reroot your phone because the root-shell-su will get deactivated (if you care about this stuff) and you will probably want to delete the sdcard-nandroid-backup directory (if you made it) each time youve created it - otherwise it starts becoming huge (due to recursion i think). good luck, h.
edit --
btw - id read about people locking-up their device trying to hold home while powering up using stock-recovery... i noticed that when i booted up in stock-recovery, i got a pretty picture but nothing else... i had to (after staring at the pic for a minute) hit the home+power buttons AGAIN to get the actual recovery-options of flashing the update.zip or whatever... just fyi...
Message was edited by: luv_dogs
