When starting the Rio, it loads music database then music playlist, then flashes, and goes back to loading music database..... Any ideas/opinions on the situation?

It didn't succeed in correctly building the database the last time you used emplode (or something's become corrupted in the meantime), and it looks like you might have something wrong with your playlist.

Connect with emplode, and let it rebuild the database properly. If that doesn't work, let us know.

Background: when the player boots, it checks to see if it can load the database from disk. If it's not there, it rebuilds it. But: it doesn't write it back to disk, because the disk's mounted read-only. If you rebuild the database with emplode, the disk is read-write, so it can be saved correctly.