One of my Photons exhibited the quick red burst behavior 2 days ago for the 1st time. After scouring the forums for possible fixes, the solution that worked for me was the following:
Get particle cli, node.js, openssl, zadig, etc. installed on my windows 8 machine as outlined by @HappyCookie
Plus, making sure that I had properly added the pathing instructions for openssl and the dfu utility to my user variables pathing list. This was actually the tricky part for me. I had accidentally placed commas after each entry instead of semicolons 
Running command prompt as admin, I then entered “particle keys doctor (my device id)” while having my Photon in DFU mode. This repaired the Photons public key, which had most likely corrupted while I was doing some funny things with voltage on a breadboard.
I must admit this took me a long time to figure out. Thank you to everyone in this post and others that helped diagnose this issue 