Thanks again, found some stuff on the serial cable so I put in an order for a 3.3v ~ 1.8v ttl USB thing... It's a Chinese make from ebay which should get here in a month...
I'm using win 8.1 x64 and also an asus eee net book with win xp for connecting with the kindle. I get absolutely no recognition by either device when plugged in to USB.
I believe I did install the rescue pack but I did not install usbnetworking (as there were a lot of warnings against newbs who don't know what they're doing).
My current plan is to connect by serial and see if I can interrupt the boot process and manually delete all the kterm accessory files I was copying into /usr/bin ...
Since that's what I was doing when it started going south, I'm hoping it's just a matter of my having overloaded a partition and that causing this fatal result (which seems like a bad way to implement a system but I guess it wasn't designed for users to go mucking around in there).
Thanks again.