No progress on this device not responding issue (see my post #52 - and others).
The most compelling explanation appears to revolve around the failure of the 1200 b port reset touch.
Because I have used this machine with 2.02 at least back in June of 2017 and reading facchinm 's post here Upload Problem: touching COM with 1200 baud rate cannot reset all the board on Windows 7. · Issue #526 · arduino/ArduinoCore-arc32 · GitHub (April 18, 2017), I do not believe it is a firmware issue.
I think it is likely a Win 7 setting issue - but I don't really know. A lot has changed on this machine in the last year, but nothing that I can point to as suspect.
sigh