Y'know, it would almost just be easier for those of us with the whole setup and know-how to charge some nominal amount and offer the service of clearing any lock code and/or flashing the device to the last great Maemo release. You'd mail one of us the device, and Paypal us, say, $10 plus whatever it cost you to send the box (so we get $10 plus money to cover the return mailing). I guess people who've been burned with Paypal disputes might recommend a postal money order instead. But you get the basic idea.

Anyway, it's clear there needs to be an easier way to recover devices than doing the death march of USB, flash images, flash utilities, supported OS for the utility, blah blah blah. Make sense to anybody else?