I've been testing out my cart in my spare time and, unfortunately, have nothing new to add other than to say that my A1 console has exactly the same behaviors as DrVenkman. Minus the being able to at least get past the loading of TowerToppler and Realsports Baseball on a cold boot. Those get stuck before completely loading no matter how long the console has been off.
It is, however, running my small programming project perfectly well.