bg1906, this sounds like me almost exaclty. My 2 1/2' female bp is the same way. She has actually struck a few times when she got really startled and hissed maybe twice. Everytime she got nervous about fast movements.

Recently my girlfriend and I have been handling her almost daily, its only been a week now but are putting in a lot of effort to calm her down, and its worked. A couple of nights ago was the first time we could actually take her out of her cage w/o her balling up on us. Normally we have to sit there and wait for her to calm down and physically work her out of her ball.

A strategy we use to work her out of her ball, and maybe you could use just to calm her down is slow, gentle stroking with your pointer finger. I just rub my pointer finger along the middle part of her body very slowly and gently. Its actually really cool to see her as she flexes that part of her body as your worked toward her tail. With each touch she moves a little bit. And when she moves a little bit you can kind of work her into a less tense and more open position. And finally she starts "crusin" as we say. She'll start crawling all over the place, and she is not longer afraid.

Like I said the other night was the first time we could skip the whole ball thing, and go directly to "cruisin" So hopefully this will keep up. And give it a try with yours.