Thank you for your reply Gus. Yes, you are correct that only a very few companies will be as responsive as you have been, on the weekend or otherwise. I have included some screen shots of some of the critical params. Hopefully this will create a breakthrough for us. Thanks.
Can you also include a picture of the GHI Netmf Debug Interface device’s information page/s ?
Brett,
Are you asking for the debug output?
No.
Fundamentally the “break” appears to be at the OS level. From the 2nd off your pictures, open the GHI device and I want to see the screenshots from the driver properties pages
Brett,
Here we go.
So it looks like the driver is loaded properly, so where is the problem? 
Just for the sake of assurance, please run the updater application one more time, since now you have the driver all loaded into windows.
Gus,
Was a good thought but I have done this dozens of times. Same result this time. No device in Dev Environment. The device shows up on COM Port6 when the DIP switches are set to 'loader", just does not show up in Visual Studio ? ? ? ? ? ?
Ok I bet you have NETMF 4.2 but not the latest one QFE2
Please go back to the “support” page above and install microsoft 4.2 QFE2 as instructed in the steps.
If this fixes it, you owe me a drink 
Gus,
Well that was fun. Re-installing QFE2 seems to have done the trick. I do not know if it will be of any help but I will be happy to package up the resources and notes for anyone else having this issue. It is not at all clear from the existing notes but is working now. Thanks for your persistence. Now it is back to work. Thanks again.
You never had QFE2 installed, as instructed by the setup steps, which where all your problems originated from.
Glad it is working for you now.
It would be really great if we could have a “howto for the intelligent idiot” in checklist format to help get us running. The software download instructions are clear, but not the update process. I was wondering if a “set the switches to XXXX, run yyy, choose option zzz, when complete set the pahser switch off” checklist would remove ambiguity and give us a common set of steps (that the community can refine) and make support easier.
I know that the documentation will be updated, but in the meantime I have had to put using my Spider on hold.
@ SteveUKman,
There are some firmware update process documents on the wiki, GHI Electronics – Where Hardware Meets Software and then for Spider (EMX based) you will find http://wiki.tinyclr.com/index.php?title=Firmware_Update_EMX
It doesn’t have the “set phasers to stun” type steps (or the set switches 
) but takes you through the updater program and the options there.
But the one thing I want to add is that unfortunately, this last round of updates is complex and is causing more issues than expected. It is not only moving from 4.1 to 4.2 but it’s also moving USB driver and that has been the source of some speed bumps during the beta/release candidate process. So I would love to say that these extra details are largely unnecessary in an ordinary SDK / firmware revision cycle, it’s just now that we need to provide as much other assistance as possible.
Now, onto your problem - we can’t have an idle Spider sitting around with nothing to do !! We’re here to help if you want us to walk you through stuff?