Figuring out a bit more. The missing link is the Provisioning service book. It looks like this SB is needed to activate period.

I just pulled a Bold 9000 out of the drawer that had been activated a while back, reset to factory then used loader.exe to reloaded the latest OS on it. In addition to the 2 wifi service books, the provisioning service book is there. On the 9700, this is missing.

It looks like the 4.6 and 4.6.1 OS includes this SB by default. Wouldn't the factory reset or OS load remove it if it wasn't baked in. Everything else is gone. Device has no SIM in and it is ATT branded.

So where does that leave us?