Rich, I would suggest that first you bookmark Google search for this site (ITT). That URL is much more useful than this site's own search, IMO. Note that this Google URL will most likely change in a few months since this forum will be moved under talk.maemo.org domain.

There's also a specific sub-forum for Canola under Apps, but that probably isn't important at the moment.

Anyway, if you go to the above Google's ITT search and enter "770 flasher r&d", the first entries will tell you what the Flasher is, where to get it from and how to use it.

Then you can follow lardman's suggestions to become root and fix the missing/broken python2.5 package. I've seen many others having problems with that package so you might like to do another search about Canola/python2.5/repository.

I wish I could provide more detailed help, especially as I've come across your informative posts about OS/2 and Linux for many, many years!