Man, it took me over 8 hours to download the newest recovery image from MS. I even did a support chat trying to explain to them that there was something wrong with their routers (a simple traceroute showed their network was horked). They wouldn't take my word for it, even after I told them I was once a MCP, that also did a short stint being a network admin.
Well, I did the full wipe, refresh on my SP3. Did the firmware update first, by itself. So far, so good. I'll have to wait a couple days to see if the firmware tries to reinstall again, as it was every couple days it would pop up to try to install again. I do have to admit, that things are running much better now, and quite a bit quicker.