Thank you for the replies as they got me thinking in the right direction. For me, it turned out that the procedure I needed to follow to reset my Photon was a lot more involved than what I could find in the tutorials and troubleshooting (see below). My next hurdle was registering my Photon in the cloud, which wouldn't work with the Android app nor using particle cli. In particle cli however there was perhaps a hint at the problem as it did not give me a WEP option for wifi security. Not a bad thing really because it motivated me to finally switch the security on my router to WPA2. With that change, I was able (just now) to register my Photon in the cloud, first try.
To perform a factory reset:
From this post:
Hold down BOTH buttons
Release only the RESET button, while holding down the SETUP button.
Wait for the LED to start flashing magenta, then yellow, then green (continue to hold the SETUP button)The LED will turn solid white (continue to hold the SETUP button)
Finally, the LED will turn blink white rapidly.
Release the SETUP button
What works for me is:
Hold down BOTH buttons
Release only the RESET button, while holding down the SETUP button.
Wait for the LED to start flashing magenta, then yellow, then speedy green then speedy white (continue to hold the SETUP button)
Finally LED will then turn solid white (continue to hold the SETUP button).
Then off for a second, then the process starts all over again.
Release the SETUP button.
** this seems to work in that the device now power up flashing blue, the same state as out of the box but I have no idea if it’s accurate. Where is this stuff documented??