My MCU experience is all with MicroChip PIC's from many years ago, and they have 'fuses' that are registers that hold the startup configuration of the MCU's peripherals (the ports, UARTS, CAN bus etc).
Does the ESP8266 have something like that and is it user read/writable ?
Second part to the question, does reflashing the bootloader change the configuration fuses/settings if they have them like above ?
Thanks,
Martin