Here's an amusing thing. I still haven't gotten an email response - however, the replacement just arrived and its a dark grey Kobo Touch! An upgrade! DH is tickled, because it looks and acts a lot like my Nook.
Only sad thing was the lack of pre-loaded classics. (He was reading those.) But I assured him that I can easily replace that on MobileReads and ManyBooks.net. That's not a biggie.
Firmware is set on 1.9.9 - what I read about the later updates online has me thinking we shouldn't update that part yet, but I haven't read all the threads yet.
Okay, right now we are real happy with Kobo again. Seems the wait was worth it!

Kobo!