Switched to Verizon and International Assist Prevented calls from Contacts List

My wife and I just switched to Verizon from AT&T when we bought iPhone 4s's. On both our phones if we tried to call from the Contacts list, calls would fail. But they would succeed if we dialed from the keypad. Another workaround was to enter a "1" before each phone number in the Contacts list.

Other symptoms:

• When entering a number in the contacts list it would put the first number in parenthesis. So if you entered 6, it would show up as (6), until the second digit was entered. Then the parenthesis would go away.
• Also, when calling we would sometimes see "International Assist" flash on the screen momentarily.

Calls would be diverted to the Verizon intercept recording, saying it couldn't be completed as dialed and telling us to contact customer support.

The fix is to go into Preferences->Phone and turn off International Support.

This happened to both of our phones. It's unlikely we ever touched this feature on our old phones, so International Assist on our iPhone 3g's should have been in it's default state. Somehow in moving over to Verizon, transferring settings via iTunes, International Assist got turned on.

I didn't see any other postings on this, so I'm hoping this help others.