Sloooowww is not the word for it. It took so much longer to restore the backup than to install the ROM upgrade.
Anyway, I upgraded according to the instructions although I did just use a USB synch/charging cable), and have not had a problem yet.
If you want speedier backups/restores, I purchased Pocket Backup Plus from Sprite Software (
www.SpriteSoftware.com) which allows you to backup to a local SD/CF card or your PC. It lets you choose exactly what you want to backup/restore, like BackupExec running on our network and is a whole magnitude quicker than the utility supplied with ActiveSynch