I found a bunch of gps related stuff at 'GMapTool' website - i was mostly trying to find a SD card loaded with the firmware info before i got here... At this point, I am just tinkering around - learning stuff about it...

So, a bit more playing around:
1)still no luck - but some changes:
- device when retrying to load the RGN shows my personalized welcome screen for a moment before turning off
- when trying to 'over write' with same version - it does give screen on my PC stating 'erasing'
- when 1st time opening updater and doing the update, it goes to 100% in a few seconds, then hangs
- Updater sometimes give a error that it cannot write to a memory region and to call Garmin
- this is 2 more errors i have seen:
> IOU_UTILITIES.CPP-203-2.7
> DIO_UIACCESSPOINT.CPP-34-2.7
Invalid window handle.

I have not yet gone the SD card route - I looking for details on that process....