Best posts made by tdm418

That certainly took care of the Z axis scaling issue.
The other axis don't want to home, but I'll work on that tomorrow. I suspect that it now is in the code and easily resolved.
Thank you very much for your time and patience. Sorry for such an amateur mistake.

@Danal , @dc42 Please read on as I suspect that this situation might recur.

So I received a replacement board from MatterHackers and here's what happened:
Plugged the new board into the desktop via usb and it immediately recognized it as a Duet device and installed drivers. Huge relief.
As soon as the drivers were installed, the error message popped up about the "unrecognized USB device".
No problem, just short the jumper, push the reset, and it will be recognized, right??? NOPE!!!
All of a sudden I was reliving the exact same experience with the new board as the last one. Not recognized regardless of USB port, USB cable, or VIN power.
Tried it on the laptop and it recognized the port as Bossa, consistently. This was new. But every time I connected Bossa and tried to flash it, either Bossa locked up, threw an error message, or just refused the connection. But I was encouraged by the consistent recognition of the Bossa port by the Device Manager. Then I noticed that the laptop had had a pretty substantial windows update in the last couple of days, so it seemed appropriate to dig a little deeper.
Back to the desktop. Windows still didn't recognize anything, so I tried Opensuse. Tried putty, ssh, hardware recognition, and about 50 different commands that should have enumerated the Duet board as a tty device. Of course, nothing at all, no recognition, no active ports or devices, just... nothing.
I flashed an updated UEFI/bios, which seemed to have a bit of an effect. Meaning that it would occasionally, maybe 10% of the time, recognize the Bossa port.
So I started googling and reading blogs. Although they mostly consisted of more commands and diagnostics, one of the arduino blogs suggested moving the usb connection down by a level and running it off of a separate usb hub. This was kind of intriguing, first, because of both machines' different behavior after updating, and second, because I have always suspected that my desktop is just off a bit. It has a first generation Ryzen 7 CPU, and also what was a bleeding edge, first gen, X370 motherboard when I built it. But it always seemed to have weird USB issues, especially with the USB 3 integration, which was originally accomplisher by software, not hardware.
So I went to WalMart and bought the cheapest USB hub I could find, unpowered. Plugged it in, and I was able to flash both boards, the new one and the old “defective” one without a hitch. Also tried with the laptop, and after erasing the updated firmware, it also worked exactly as advertised.
All I can think of that there is a disconnect somewhere with the USB 3.0 protocol since this resolution worked across two very different machines, and the USB 3.0 seems to be the common denominator. Hopefully this will help someone else out, as it has taken a few weeks and probably over 300 attempts to get this ironed out.
Now that the board is functional, I’m sure that I’ll be hitting you guys up for help with something else. Thank you in advance…