I've owned a Blackberry for a few years now and have performed all firmware upgrades by deleting the vendor.xml file and running the loader.exe file. A side effect of performing this upgrade is the loss of application settings for every third party application that was installed. I have to launch every application and go through the setup wizard as if the application was installed for the very first time. The most annoying part of this process is that App World is no longer aware of all the applications that were previously installed through the App World app. When I click on My World from within App World, the list is blank.

When I had my 9000, I performed one OTA firmware upgrade that was released by AT&T and all of my application settings were preserved. Since AT&T releases an update so infrequently, I'm forced to perform upgrades from other vendors to fix certain bugs.

Is there a way to perform a USB firmware upgrade that preserves all of my application settings?