!! Success! Hard booting (hold for 30 secs) sent it back to happy kindle mode!
Now...all I'll do is boot again with it plugged to the compu..
A small miracle...on rebooting, I plug the dxg to the laptop and there it is..rndis. Follow tinyapp's advice and the first bytes start pouring into the DX
I now have the same problem as ddd12323 on hawhills original megathread and will follow up there.
Thank you all for troubleshooting this with me...guess the old joke about computers is right: when in doubt, restart.
-Cheers