I created a small 7 sec ringtone from a wav file and it plays fine but only the first 3 secs of it when the phone rings.. If i go to the media section and play it, it plays fine and plays all the 7 secs.... Ideas??

I had this same problem and it drove be crazy for days. I started digging around the official blackberry site and discovered a blurb about compliant file formats for ringtones.

The 8800 will not play wav's as ringtones. It will play mp3's however.

I converted my wav's to mp3's with conversion software i downloaded at
River Past Software - Audio and video recording, conversion and editing

The trial software will only convert files less than 2 minutes in length.
I'm sure there are other converters out there without this limitation.