I appreciate the assistance several of you provided. As it turns out the image that was installed on the flash was a compressed image only for the 1605, and not for the 1601-1604 routers. It looks like someone at RMA inadvertantly loaded the wrong software to flash, and it ended up throwing most off guard. I knew it had to be something simple. For the record in the 1600-series world.. images with c1600-mz* are compressed and will only work on the 1605 model. Images with c1600-l* are for the 1601-1604 models and are not compressed. The responses ranged from get new flash, get new router, your tftp is broke, you didn't get the whole image, to finally...wrong image, thanks to some fine folks from Cisco here on Nanog :=) Hats off to you folks. Now I can keep all my hair, and draw a quick breath of sanity before the next lightning storm or backhoe comes through.