To get to the root cause I ended up writing a quick sense check for the SDK millis() function just spitting out the result of millis() every 15 seconds. What I got was surprising as it was counting up only on every fourth call so it appears that millis() actually returns a seconds counter instead of a milli-seconds counter.
Anybody else experienced that or something obvious I'm doing wrong? I went back and renamed my function for now not using the SDK function to get the firmware working again...
EDIT: posted in the wrong sub-forum. if an admin reads this, please move to general discussion subforum