Oh.. I wonder if I can work around this by reordering the "chunks" inside the .upgrade file, so that at least one of the flash memory partitions gets written AFTER the hard disk partition. That'll slow it down enough for the problem to "go away".

I'll see about trying this.. depends on whether or not the MS-Win upgrade tool does things in the same order as they appear in the .upgrade file though.

EDIT:
Well, it does seem to process the chunks in the order they appear within the .upgrade file. BUT.. any attempt to move flash chunk(s) to after the hda5 chuck results in "flash erase errors". Whatever that means.

Something fishy going on here..