I fixed it! Stange things happen sometimes...
Photojojo: I tried your recommendation with the advancedsetup. Changed the delay to 1000 - still the same problem. Then I played with some values, increasing and decreasing incrementally - for almost half an hour. But, unfortunately to no avail. Then I noticed that the green message (which I always saw only for a tenth of a second every time) does not say "upgrade successful", but instead: "connection successful". Briefly after, Renasas just crashed each and every time.
Out of pure desparation I went for one more try, choosing COM3 (although I knew that I was on COM1 and COM3 could not possibly work since it is used by Bluetooth on my machine). As expected, the connection wasn't successful. Still eager to succeed, I switched it back to COM1 and...it worked. Mysteriously.
I can only speculate: maybe the software needed one "complete" (yet not successful) run via COM3 to end one run regularly (without abnormal termination). Then, the system was apparently ready to grant me a successful run with COM1.
w00t! And thanks both of you for the support.
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