[russg]

MilhouseVH,

I don't know how many times I've started to work on a script to do some parts of what yours does but its suffice to say that something else always took precedence. In this case, my laziness has paid off because your work is far superior to anything I would have hacked together.

Your work has made my RBpi box shine again and I humbly thank you for that.

I've read the entirety of this thread and it was cool to read the evolution of your work.
Have you considered a client/service model? It just crossed my mind while reading this thread.
You have some functions that can work remotely over the web/json interface but there are parts that must have access to the instance filesystem. If there were a service add-in that could be called through the web/json interface you could possibly just command the service install to do those local operations you need in some functions.

There are likely details that I'm not aware of that may prevent such a configuration. And maybe it is best that some of the evolution of this processing become native to XBMC.

Great stuff and again thank you!