retrolefty:
Thanks Jeff; Unfortunately the results appear to remain the same.
Drat. But I have good news! The results of successful readBytes() and unsuccessful readWords(), now that I've thought about the info staring me in the face, changed my assumption about always requesting the number of bytes needed, even when working with 16-bit registers. The readWords() method was requesting one byte (because I thought "one" on that hardware would actually mean one word), and therefore failing because it was only ever receiving one byte. I've adjusted that call to request length * 2 bytes and pushed the changes up. Try it now.
(Incidentally, if this doesn't work, I won't be able to try another fix until tomorrow...almost 2am here, heh.)
Jeff