Thank you @
atom! I just got there myself, and it fixed me up. The Dropbox link in
this post had the tool. I stumbled through the Chinese procedure and this seemed to give me the hard reset I needed. Whew!
This all started when I changed my admin password. I just went back to look at that and see if I could figure out what happened... I tried changing the admin pw again and sure 'nuff, it switches that Administrator account to an Operator account! Maybe this is a quirk of this firmware release, I dunno. Never seen anyone else complaining about it but it's an easy 100% repro for me!
Now, to go use the tool again, upgrade my firmware... and then leave that password alone.