I have a sinking feeling that nobody uses or cares about the i730 anymore, but I thought I'd give the forum a shot anyway.
Preface (you might want to just skim this part): I bought a second hand i730 about a year and a half ago, and I fell in love with it. Six months in, a plumber splashed it and it never worked well again- but it did work as a phone and money's bad, so I hung in with it for another year. It finally crapped out for good (somehow it hard reset itself and wound up stuck on the non-functioning align screen) so I went back to eBay and decided I'd get another of the same- I liked the model, I already had a bunch of extra batteries, and it would be affordable- which I received a few days ago.

So, I got this shiny new refurb and got to work upgrading it to WM5. I was certain that this would go smoothly, since I had been relatively successful the first time around (it hung a few times, but thanks to this forum I knew how to work things out.) Just to be sure, I reacquainted myself with all of the old upgrade threads, did my best to make sure the modem drivers were uninstalled, turned off all my other running programs, etc.

Of course, the upgrade stalled out at around the 74% mark anyway. I didn't panic since I knew about emergency mode, etc, and eventually disconnected the phone. Despite the fact that the new OS seemed ok, I knew from other people's posts that the phone would probably not work properly, so I uninstalled the drivers again, went into emergency mode, and reconnected. This time the upgrade stalled at 2% and the "download mode" phase. (similar to this thread: http://pdaphonehome.com/forums/samsung-i730-i830-i830w/88617-trouble-reloading-wm5-i730.html. I then became genuinely frustrated, because nothing ever was resolved in that thread. I tried most of the suggestions there and in other threads, but never was able to get the process beyond the 2% mark. I was tired and frustrated so I decided to go to bed and start fresh today.

So here's what's weird. I put the battery into the phone and WM5 came up as though nothing were wrong. Just out of curiosity, I wanted to see what would and wouldn't work. I have since used the phone successfully, connected to WiFi, synced my contacts, opened ringtone manager, the games, the remote control, and MS office- and everything is working. I know this shouldn't be the case- again, the upgrade never got past 74%, but there it is, for now.

My question is, should I just use the phone for now until something happens, or am I risking making things worse? Should I try yet again to run the upgrade process (at which point I will be back on here asking for more advice regarding how to get out of the 2% zone?) Not sure what to do, other than the face that I was phoneless for nearly a week last week and really would like to get my life back to normal soon. Any thoughts?