Lpc2000

> Most recently Philips said "the bootloader is unlikely to get erased or 
> corrupted during IAP call even if wrong frequency is used."  This is is 
> proof enough from the horse's mouth that the problem exists.
<snip>

Only Taxes and Death are certain (Don't recall who said that). Ok you
can evade taxes. No one makes absolute claim these days to avoid
liability. I won't worry about that statement. Have you got anything else?
> 
> I upgraded my boot loader from 1.03 to 1.52 but the problem did not go 
> away.  [I really cannot remember if it got worse or better because
code was 
> volatile during that time.] <snip>

I have a different experience. After upgrade failing parts programmed
flawlessly. I don't read this group regularly. Did anyone else report
flash problems after upgrade on the group?
> 
> The above is my grounds on which I make the claim.  I still have two
boards 
> with dead LPC on my desk if someone wants to do forensics to confirm
that 
> boot loader is indeed dead.  I will swap it for good boards anytime.
> 

Is it possible that you erased the philips bootloader while reverse
engineering the bootloader. Can't you revive the dead boards since you
have the ability to reprogram the boot sector with your own
bootloader. Have you tried to reprogram the chip via JTAG using your
own flash programming algorithms? If you can't access those chips via
jtag then this would indicate dead parts. This means that something
else went wrong which caused dead parts.

> 
> Sure it would be nice bugs could be demonstrated by code examples. 
Timing 
> problems unfortunately depend on far too many variables to be
reproduced in 
> a deterministic manner.
> 
> Having said this, we know for a fact that there was a timing problem
that 
> causes IAP calls to not return, and this was addressed by way of a boot 
> loader update.  Why is it not reasonable to ask if that did really
fix the 
> problem, given the code does not seem to do what it appears it ought
to be 
> doing?

No offence but without a solid example above explanation sounds like
putting 2 and 2 together unscientifically.