Has this been solved? If so, I would appreciate a description of the solution. I have exactly the same problem. The board seemed to work fine for a while, but one day the SpDir LED never stopped flashing when I connected the power.
I tried to re-flash the firmware (I already had v 438.02 installed before the crash) using the method described above with exactrly the same result, namely that the verification failed.
I am eager to hear what happened after the last reply.