Hello Chuck,
As this is the official Polycom community hosted by Polycom and moderated by Polycom employees allow me to close this post as you are correct as we seem to go in circles.
You mention no option for you to recover the phone was available but my first reply => here<= already contained this very option.
Questioning the age and a serial number of the device could have given us an insight on the Hardware Revision and possible BootROM software state.
Without this we can only guess and confirm that older phones and / or older BootROM Versions did not have this option.
Attempting to flash a new software may have overcome this but you decide not to.
Our phones constantly go through further software development and are delivered with newer software versions carefully planned to suit our larger enterprise customers.
You may have newer SIP software / BootROM's on these other phones but not following up as advised never cleared up the issue for this single phone.
Best Regards
Steffen Baier
Polycom Global Services