A friend of mine has a problem installing custom FW 2.1 on his iPhone:
He had a pwned iPhone 2G (unlocked) with 2.0.2 and upgraded with iTunes to the original 2.1. After that, his iPhone was locked. I gave him my custom FW 2.1 (pwned / unlock) that he can upgrade with ALT + Click on "Restore". After iTunes has installed the custom FW it told him, that it can't find the activation informations for this iPhone.
The FW is 100% OK, because I upgraded my own 2G with this FW and had no problems.