Ok, Well I'm not sure this has anything to do with your problem but I thought I would tell you about this just in case. I was having trouble with emplode locking up at the very end of a sync (on stage 10..) really after the sync when it is trying to get the new info from Empeg. What I did was hooked up both Serial and USB and did a sync via USB. It didn't happen every time but sometimes the player would crash after a sync and go to a shell (on the developer version, not sure about consumer).. I could then issue commands via the serial and execute player again and emplode would complete without errors and not locking up.
So If you are having this same problem it may appear that emplode has locked up when in reality it is waiting for a crashed player to respond. Perhaps the empeg could detect this and reexecute the player when it crashes.

Tom

Reg #2845: Mark 1 #00173, Mark 2 #119