I sent this to USAir customer service today. Since it wil lprobably do no good there, I will post it here so at least it may help someone else avoid my mistake:

I used to fly US Air a lot - enough to be Silver Preferred.  Then it got to be more and more of a pain, so when Jet Blue came along, I was all in.  I have a need to go to Chicago in March, and you are one of the airlines that has a direct flight, so I decided to give it a shot.  What the heck - it might be nice to go back to USAir again.  When I logged into the website, I explored flights that would work, and started to reserve tickets on one.  Then I remembered that I had been a frequent flyer, and so (before booking the flight) I logged in under my old number.  Turns out I had a bunch of miles that I had forfeited.  If I got them back, I could maybe cash them in for this flight.  I looked into it, and because of the number of miles it would cost $300 to reactivate them.  Well, if I spent it, at least I could save about $100 on the flight.  So, I had a dilemma - what if I paid for the miles, and then you would not let me redeem them on the flight I wanted?  That had happened to me often enough - its exactly why I cancelled the USAir Dividend Miles Visa card; because I didn;t have all these problems when I used the Capital One card that gave me miles on any airline I wanted.  I thought for a bit, and decided to give it a try.  Sure enough, after spending $300, NONE of the direct flights were offered to me when I tried booking an award flight. I had to go through either Philly or Cincy.  Guess I should have known.  OK, so at least I can use them to upgrade the flight I wanted after paying full fare.  No such luck.  I called to redeem some miles for an upgrade, and, of course, there’s nothing available.  You know what?  How about we do this:  You give me my $300 back, and take the miles.  They are never going to do me any good anyway.  You must have good business reasons why the system is set up like this, but at least in my case, it serves mostly to remind me why I went to JetBlue in the first place, and why I’m probably better off just sticking with them.

No. of times flown on this Airlines:	More than 10
Class flown most frequently:	Economy Class