[Ron46]

Believe it or not, I recovered my JBL by resetting/ restarting about 10 times, and just leaving it on the stuck screen each time until it shut down from the 10 minute power down selection I had it set to. On about the 11th attempt, it started up, got part way (to the books picture) then stalled. On about the 12th attempt, it made it to the main menu. I shut it down then reloaded the firmware to be safe. I ran a chkdisk/ defrag on the SD card and now it runs fine.

This was pure luck, because when it is stuck on the initial screen, it responds to NOTHING, including attempts at a diagnostic startup or a firmware update startup.

I set the auto shutdown to 30 minutes to give it more time in case this happens again.

This event was triggered by an uncontrolled shutdown. Using NIMH batteries, when the indicator goes to 1/2, the batteries are about 2 minutes from being dead (the indicator seems calibrated to alkaline batteries), and you have to shut it down immediately. There is no warning either. Since I was reading, I must have missed the switch from 3/4 to 1/2. Ectaco really needs to add a "battery type" selection to the settings menu so the meter is accurate. It's just a matter of changing voltage thresholds- Palm Pilots did this 10 years ago! I have no plans to switch to throw-away alkaline batteries- I think they are environmentally irresponsible.

Ken- I would be really interested in what you find out with the defective unit you are getting- whether you can recover it and how you did it. Like I said, I was just lucky.