@munky: heh, if only that'd get me anywhere.

Okay, for some strange reason the device started working today. I haven't had any power-on issues for a while of usage now. Unfortunately, that most likely means that I have a flaky device instead of a known-dead-get-me-a-new-one device.

Anyway, with the flashing issue I called Nokia and got bumped to level 2 tech support. They were convinced I was using a N810 image, so hand-held me through re-downloading the latest, which was of course the exact same file I'd been trying it with. Same result on the flasher. I'm running XP Pro x64, which is right there on the list of supported OSes for the flasher, but he basically left me with "Try it on 32-bit windows, if that doesn't work then ship it to us to reflash it." Thanks, *****, how would that solve my problem if I wanted to reflash it myself at some later point?

VMWare to the rescue. I tried it on a 32-bit XP VM and of course got the same problem; I'd expect to get Windows errors if running it on x64 was a problem. I then installed a Ubuntu VM and went through the incredible pains of trying to get vmware-tools to install for a shared directory, finally just falling back to SMB access to my host box.

...and got the "To flash the bootloader, you have to supply the X-Loader image" error. So time to snoop through the commandline options. --cold-flash sounds promising, but wants to use the serial port, probably a JTAG mechanism. Googling for that error phrase brought me back to these forums with OSX user problems who install each part separately, so I got it to work with --flash-only:

"--flash-only nolo" just gave the same x-loader error. I suspect that Nokia repair put a different version of the low-level boot/flash stuff on my device which is confusing the GUI flasher program, and I have no way to update NOLO or the other underlying portions. Gee, thanks.

Hopefully this will work well enough. If it turns out to be some showstopper problem, I'm just in the same boat again with having to send to Nokia for a reflash.