Found a Chinese version of the firmware on the Chinese RCA support site! There the EMUSIC1 is called FM6652.
This firmware is for the Chinese market, so it will boot up in Chinese, but you can use the menu to change the language to English (navigate using the icons!), and after you set the language to English, it will stay in English. Note that only English and the two Chinese variants are available in this firmware.
Anyways, it brought my player back to life. I've been using it for about a week and it seems to work exactly like the firmware it originally had on it. BUT so far it hasn't exhibited any of the flakiness of the original (no more freezing of Windows during file transfers, etc! So far, at least...). I'm not making any guarantees that this is a better firmware version than the US market original, but it seems to be. The only bad news is, it hasn't improved the very short battery life - I get like two or three hours, same as before... OK, I do like my music LOUD!
Here's the link to the approx 5MB .rar download:
http://www.rca.net.cn/Down.asp?ID=0712711505835365&DownID=06121511170439198
To resurrect a dead EMUSIC1 on a Windows XP machine, download and decompress the rar file, then dive down through the folders, clicking on 6652... at each level until you come to stupdaterapp.exe Double click that and it will start looking for your EMUSIC1. Hold the PLAY button in on the EMUSIC1 while plugging it into the USB port. Keep that button down until you see that the program has started to find your player, then follow the prompts in the program. Note that the program will reformat the flash memory and erase any songs you have on it.
flashGoogler, November 2007
