> Are the old sims still active, you may now need to ring O2 to activate
> the new sim cards & de-activate the old ones.

Thanks for the reply - figured that out after speaking to one of my
colleagues who's had more phones than i've had hot lunches (and that's
saying something !)

I did get one fly in the ointment though...

Phone#1: SIM registered fine, and was able to set up a SIM pin
eventually after speaking to customer services - which involved
purposely locking it out as what they said were the default codes
didn't work, getting the PUK, then resetting the pin..

Phone#2: SIM registered fine again, same phone call as the previous,
got to the stage where they locked out the SIM, but the (new) PUK
would *not* unlock it again. Was told I had to take it to a shop to
exchange it for a new SIM, as the one I had must be faulty. Cue a
hurried trip to St Helens shop, where they first of all wanted to
charge me £15 for a working SIM (I told them to check the account
notes) - they managed to find one (not very well organised it's fair
to say, had to start scanning a box full !) and then weren't happy as
they would apparently have to foot the bill for it as no voucher code
was raised by customer services. If they ever read this though, thanks
for your efforts :-) (brother-in-law has just had a heart attack so we
*really* need to get it up again asap)

Still unable to use phone#2 as cust services was shut by this time, so
I can't get it registered. Gotta love technology :-/