after getting over the initial waves of depression i plugged it in and watched the serial out. it loads up fine
only the normal errors. while im waiting for details from support as to what to do i gave my friend use of the hard drive tray i had in mine as its larger and has more songs than his did. so i cant try it out again to see if the buttons are in fact working. and yeah, it was prolly rebuilding database as thats what it did when we hooked up his vfd to my board. are the fuses on the mobo or on the vfd board? if the former than my fuses are fine.