For this protection, I am very grateful. So stupid that I didn't realize what I was doing myself. 25 years ago I had this process down cold...too much time.
So I got the kernel flashed on both units.
I'm installing the mlord's car2-v21.upgrade presently via emplode on Wine (onto the newer unit with a legacy 60G drive.) Still in the "pumping partition" phase and in the process it did throw an "0000.17 hda: err: stat_err" message on the player screen, even so, things seem to be still progressing.
THANKS AGAIN TO ALL!!!