One question, though, have you had your USB stick plugged in this whole time? With Poseidon's default settings, my machine would hang with a USB stick inserted on boot. Something to do with timeout settings. Changed those, re-uploaded the Flash, and now everything works. I wonder if you were running into something similar?
Yes! When I first installed the board, I saw the internal port and thought to myself, what good is that? The obvious answer is a USB thumb drive to use for backups. So that was the first thing I added and it's been there ever since.
What's odd is that I only started experiencing total boot failure after I tried reflashing the ROM. Another weird thing is that every time I booted the Deneb intro always played twice, right from the very beginning. Originally I assumed that was just the way it was. Now I'm thinking the machine was doing an unasked for reboot after the first time through DenebIntro.
In retrospect, three things were key in solving this problem. First was using the left button boot to get the machine to even start up at all. Second was downloading the latest Trident. And third was removing the pio device from the flash rom. I did a cold boot and everything is still good.
I was greatly confused by the presence of two different utilities, Trident and Luciferin, both purporting to influence the operation of Deneb. And with no real documentaiton about what they do or how to use them, I was pretty much lost. So many thanks again to everyone who helped me bring this problemn to a successful conclusion. You guys are awesome.