Recently I had changed jobs. My earlier employer had a BlackBerry Enterprise Server and my BlackBerry HandHeld was locked by the IT policy. Since I used to use my own SIM as well as Handset, the policy which was pushed to my phone was pretty permissive. However certain things like the “Firewall Policy” as we  as the “Password Policy” was locked.

I had been lethargic for the first few days but finally decided to sit and clean up the policy. Unfortunately the BlackBerry Admin of my previous employer was too “lazy” to push a blank policy file to my device. So I had to manually remove the policy. A very good writeup on how to remove the IT policy can be found here.

However after completing the entire procedure I found that although the General Settings screen inside Security didn’t show any IT Policy present, I was unable to disable the Firewall. There was a small red lock icon displayed next to Enabled on the Firewall Options page. I could however disable the Password policy which further confused me. My first assumption was, the blank policy file which I downloaded and pushed must have been corrupted. However on further looking I found that its not the case. Poking around in a lot of BlackBerry related forum revealed that a second wipe should do the trick. The device is going to the second wipe now.

I however feel that is a functional flaw. Why would the device need 2 wipes in order to completely clean all IT policies?

Update 1: Wiping the BlackBerry didn’t help Need to look further.

Update 2: Found a much simpler way to solve the problem here. Turns out that RIM has been sensible enough and provided a mechanism to directly resetting devices to factory settings by using the standard loader.