Ok so finally had to break down and ask the forum since I cant find any logical explanation for what I am seeing (or not seeing)
My upgrade from 5.24 to 5.25 caused some corruption and stopped by router dead in its tracks. Tried to go downgrade and that made it even worse. So now I have the panic KILL showing up on the console. EXECVE: No such file or directory…
OK no biggie I can just netinstall 5.24 and be on my way. Sure…if I could only get the router to see Netinstall BOOTP server on my PC. Now…its not one but 2 PC’s that are not able to talk to the router. I have tried straight and crossover cables just for giggles and that really should not matter. I tried the reset button procedures, I know for sure that the booter is set to ethernet boot only and I can watch it on the console. I turned off any antivirus and firewall I could find in WIN7 and still no connection. I can see the LED flashing on both the router and my PC’s so someone is talking to someone.
I made sure that I have my PC set for 192.168.88.10 and router for 192.168.88.20. This is done via a direct connection, have not tried going through a switch yet. Also have not tried monitoring with wireshark to see whats traversing the wires
My next step is to try an old XP laptop that I have lying around the house to see if that will work or not.
Has anyone seen any issues with a WIN7 machine that cannot talk back using Netinstall to the RB2011?
Oh yeah I did successfully upgrade the firmware from 3.0 to 3.08 so thats one good plus for today!
I really hope this doesn’t turn into an RMA issue since I would like to get this resolved and back on line. Of course the old standby (D-Link DIR-655) has to substitute for now… 
Update 1: I got home and pulled out my crusty old XP laptop and fired that up. I was able to get the router to make a connection with the laptop. So far so good at least now I know Netinstall can talk to the router and vice versa. So I took 5.25 and loaded all the packages and that worked fine. OK so now I am up on 5.25
Then went and loaded up 6.0 and got that up and running. Took the old .rsc file I had and ran that to get all my settings back in. Well at least most of them did. For some reason my other username I had in lieu of admin was missing and my wireless info was default. There were a few other things I noticed but I assume that the script I created was from the config that had gotten corrupted when I tried to do the original upgrade from 5.24 to 5.25.
Lesson learned (at least in my view) WIN7, and I actually used 3 machines not 2, doesnt like letting BOOTP play nice with it. I had everything turned off but yet I could not reach the router. That was with a DELL laptop, DELL desktop and a Toshiba laptop. I didnt even want to venture with my WIN8 machine at home.
Also always good to have multiple backups and backup scripts in case you need to reload. I wasnt sure that my old script would run correctly under 6.0 since I had created it under 5.24 but I dont believe there were any errors that I could see when the script ran.
So I just need to understand if anyone else has ever got Netinstall to work with their RB’s under WIN7 and if so what did you have to do??