I have followed jibi's OS Upgrade thread more than a couple times to upgrade the OS on my 8700r. I just followed it again today to grab the latest Bharti (India) - 4.1.0.466/4.1.0.351 release and when the device upgrade completed, I received this error:

Unable to Complete the Loading Operation:

A fatal error has occurred while updating your device's software. Please try again.

Unspecified error encountered [J:0x00000008]

I followed the tutorial to the letter, including deletion of Vender.xml, replacement of blackberry.alx, and the swap out of the Vodafone themes in the Java directory. During the actual installation/upgrade I chose not to backup/restore app data because I prefer a clean installation every time.

After the process I am left with a simple white background with a text list of applications (see screenshots). The Send/End buttons don't work either. The themes menu shows a list of themes, however selecting any of them does not change the system... I'm redoing the installation now and will see if it corrects itself.

Googling this error message turns up nothing. Am I a first?

Whatever it was, upgrading it a second time seemed to fix the problem... Just an FYI in case anyone else experiences the same error.