Thank you KNC - while it took a LOT of searching to find it, I did find several references to search bar commands.
The commands ";demo" and ";exit_demo" would not work. They simply came back and said they weren't found.
The command ";dsts" did allow me to get into the settings, but not much I could really do in there.
The key command was ";uzb". It finally allowed me to get to the kindle's contents in windows. Finding the right software release was a different story. After a bunch more of searching, I finally found what I needed to know about my kindle (based on the first 4 characters of the serial # being B05A and the current OS being 5.4.0) and my first attempt to put 5.6.1.1 on it failed. I had to find a really old copy of 5.4.3.2 on an unpublished Amazon webpage and that worked. When I randomly restarted it to see if it would lose the sample books, it again updated and took me 5.6.1.0.6 automatically. I think I'll stop there for now on that one.
Any ideas on my other Kindle that I Kubrick'ed and it refuses to use a valid WiFi?
Thanks again,
Uncle Rogi