[Matt Devo]

I would appreciate some help.

I am stuck at the "Booting from Hard Disk" screen. I wanted to do the standalone XBMC boot, and I followed directions, however, pressing ESC does nothing and I am never allowed to select a boot device. Most of the information I have found in this thread applies to the dual boot problems. AS I read it none of it applies in my case.

Holding in the recovery button and booting does nothing. Instructions say I should have 5s to press escape the "booting from hard disk" message comes up immediately.

this is correct, the recovery button is useless once you have flashed the Coreboot firmware for standalone mode. The 'booting from hard disk' msg comes up immediately when it does not detect a bootable USB stick connected. Try using a different USB stick (you will need to download OpenELEC and use their Create InstallStick tool).

I followed the instructions in the wiki to download chromium too... Takes me to a the google help site that says to download their chrome os recovery tool. I downloaded it and ran it. When I click on the "local image" option, it won't let me select the .iso for chromium. Another dead end.

You are confusing the two steps. The Chromium ISO needs to be written to a USB stick using Win32 Disk Imager, which then allows you to boot ChromiumOS and re-flash your stock firmware, so that you can use the Google recovery tool/recovery media. But you don't need to do this at all.

I followed the instructions at the front of this thread closely. I skipped over the stuff about dual boot and legacy bios as it indicated it only applied to dual boot. Everything went exactly as written in the standalone instructions until I rebooted to actually load openelec.

I'm using a USB2 thumb drive. do I need to use USB3 (I can't imagine that's the problem though.)

What do I do now? I'm basically stuck at this boot screen and I can't do a thing...

As above, use a different USB stick for installing OpenELEC, as it's not detecting the one you are using for some reason.