If you are having trouble with your iPhone starting and are getting the spinning wheel over the Apple Logo when your device starts up, or just can't respring, this may help.
I like to call a "Faux-Upgrade". Do a Shift+Click in iTunes on the upgrade button to upgrade to the same firmware you have now and this will of course erase your 3rd party apps and you will have to use ziphone or jailbreakme.com again, but otherwise this will fix the problem of from what understand springboard not loading as well as it will retain your personal information such as contacts, calendar, notes, bookmarks...Although all the Library files for official apps are retained as well as your music and videos, you may loose some of your 3rd party app's library files so SSH into your device and back them up if you can. If you can't SSH just try something like iPhoneBrowser. In the case that your iPhone continually restarts as did mine, just try putting it into Recover Mode.
I have done this with 1.1.4 before and only lost my 3rd party apps, but retained everything else like I mentioned. iTunes thinks this is a regular upgrade and therefore retains personal information, but upgrades/restores and recovers/fixes your other system partition.
If you didn't know the iPhone ships with 2 partitions. Although I believe it is all on the same chip of memory or 2, it is partitioned.
Everything but "/private/var/root/" or "/private/var/mobile" would fall under the system partition.
