No, AT+RST does not wipe the firmware.
Sorry, I misunderstood your message, and thought you where loading an Arduino program on the ESP (well, this is the ESP8266 Arduino Platform section, after all). What I do not understand now is how are your devices connected, and how are you sending AT commands and reading the output.
Sorry I wasn't exactly sure what the correct section was, someone please move it if there's a more relevant one.
Anyway, I just want to add wifi support to an existing Arduino project. I thought about moving it all across to the ESP-03 but I need too many PWM pins.
So I have the ESP-03's TX/RX connected to Arduino pin's 2 and 4 respectively, via a logic level converter.
I'm powering both the Arduino, and the ESP-03 from a breadboard PSU as it was cheap and convenient and can supply current.
All grounds connected.
ESP-03 : CH-PD tied to VCC and GPIO15 tied to ground.
The whole setup was working fine and I was able to issue AT commands (via code in OP) and get it connected to my router etc, all good.
Then at for some reason I sent through AT+RST and no response since.
I just thought there might be something trivial that I've missed with regard to resetting the device.