(General reply to thread - not at Bitt specifically!)

I haven't noticed anything said here that is wrong. You're all correct;

If the Accessory line is high or the empeg is on AC power then it is impossible to get a complete shutdown. Muting, spinning down the disks and blanking the screen is it. (ie Standby)
On DC power, once the accessory line goes low, then it is up to the software to complete the shutdown, using the power_ioctl in empeg_power.c. State should be saved first.
The standard player binary writes state to the scratch partition on a regular basis, thus minimising the amount of data that it needs to save during powerfail. AFAIK, the only data saved during powerfail is to flash - there wouldn't be enough power or time to spin up the disks.
Check empeg_state.c