[Verizon Droid Charge] angelsix:
Thanks for all the help. Everything seems to be fine. This is just sort of a summary & wind-up post of another noobie's experience and successful quest for cellphone happiness.

First, there seem to be three ways to do scary things to the e-guts of my cellphone.

#1 -- Odin3 (a.k.a. Odin, but Odin3 v.x is the one that works for Samsung/Verizon Droid Charge [SDC]). Odin3 runs on the computer, with the cellphone properly tethered to the computer, and can insert stuff, like CWM. So, mostly the first step is to use Odin3 to insert CWM (superseding the stock recovery program). From some post it seemed it's possible to skip this step and do everything from Odin3, but that post also said that approach wasn't for noobies, even though it seemed easier to me. Odin3 is an elegant program, but you have to find somebody's Betty Crocker instructions for how to use it.

#2 -- Use the ordinary SDC file tethering to put .zip files onto the SDCard, because CWM uses those to install things like kernels and OS's (versions of Android). Sometimes the kernel and OS come bundled. Sometimes not. I ended up flashing a kernel first, then an OS with a bundled kernel, and everything seems fine.

#3 -- there's some other program, starting with an "H" that can also work like Odin, I think, but I ended up anxious enough figuring out #1 and #2, so didn't want to learn a whole other approach that might, or might not, somehow have been better, so I ignored this approach.

After I had my new root kernel, I used Titanium backup to freeze the bloatware. At that point I sort of chickened/burned out because there were too many choices of which version of Android to flash. I decided I didn't really need any of them, since my phone would be efficient enough without the bloatware running to give me everything I needed. What originally got me to start flashing my Android phone was when I would (repeatedly) receive calls on my old Samsung Vibrant, but the phone was so busy doing some !@#$%^&*! thing that it wouldn't let me answer the call. With a more advanced phone (my new SDC), and frozen bloatware, I was confident I wouldn't have that problem, so just stopped there ... ... ... until I was horrified to receive another call which my SDC told me about but was too busy doing some !@#$%^&*! thing that it wouldn't let me answer the call. OMG, it's happening again! At that point the choice of which version of Android to use because less important, because I was sure that nobody's custom Android would let that happen. So, I went with the GummyCharged Froyo [GummyChargedFE_2.0.zip]. At this point, I'd worked with CWM enough that it was all easy. Downloaded the file, copied it to my SDCard, booted to recovery, erased files & Dalvik cache, flashed the GummyCharged, and restarted. Lovely.

One nice aspect I'd not anticipated was that somebody has thoughtfully improved the process, so immediately my phone started re-downloading and installing the apps I had before. It's kind of a hassle to have to re-do all that manually, so special chops/thanks to the GummyCharged team for that feature. My phone works fine. I've tried, and happily failed, to make it too busy to let me answer a call.

What's left? I have to make donations to the Gummycharged people, whose software I now use, and the person who tweaked CWM that I use. It feels like I should make a donation to the Odin3 trolls, but haven't seem a request for that, nor have any who they are or how to do that.

I'll also be keeping my eye on the developing Gingerbread kernels, occasionally, until it looks like those are so mature that there's no reason to not confidently install & flash (through Odin or CWM, both of which I not feel fairly comfortable with) the upgrade.

On the off chance that anybody's still reading this, I do have one last question:

Can I delete the GummyCharged .zip file from my SDCard. I remember, back when I flashed my Vibrant, that I later deleted a seemingly useless .zip file called "update.zip", and that caused a problem. File isn't huge, so except for my mild OCD, no big problem in just leaving it there.

Thanks, again, to the wonderful experts who've helped me and so many others through this.