The 0xffffffff is -1, which is generally a catch-all error number -- i.e. it doesn't mean anything other than "something went wrong".
Stage 5, on the other hand, is the stage in which the bulk of the upload happens.
In short it's saying: "Uploading your changes failed with an unknown error".
Which isn't terribly useful, which is why we're putting quite a lot of work into v1.1 to make the error messages more understandable.
Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg
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roger