[Kindle Fire General] BananaFusion:
Well after a few hours of researching, I successfully got my KF running ICS! I must have been one of the lucky one's, because once I figured out all the instructions (using this post and these videos mostly), it went off without a hitch.

I got one of those $140 Kindles from the sale last week, and after about 20 minutes of messing around with the default interface, I knew I wanted something less limiting.

The only issue I ran into during the whole process was when I ran the install_drivers.bat in the Kindle Fire Utility on my WinXP machine, it refused to load them. Apparently that batch file only works on Win7. But to get around it, I just connected the Kindle via USB to my laptop, manually installed the ADB drivers, and after that it was easy.

Files Needed:

Kindle Fire Utility 0.9.5

ICS ROM - I used the 3-19 release of Energy ICS ROM

Steps I did:

1) Purchase Kindle. Came with version 6.2.1 of the stock software. Realize you want something better.

2) Unzip the Kindle Fire Utility into a folder on your hard drive.

3) For Win7: Run the install_drivers.bat inside the folder you just unzipped.

3a) For XP: Follow this video for installing the drivers manually by plugging in your Kindle to your computer. When done, you should have an ADB device enumerated on your computer.

4) Then run run.bat in the KFU folder.

5) Run option 2 - "Install Permanent Root with Superuser"

6) Run option 5 - "Install Latest FireFireFire"

7) Run option 3 - "Install Latest TWRP"

8) Next start up the Kindle like normal (you'll notice the boot screen is different now!), and connect it to your computer to act as a flash drive.

9) Take the EnergyROM zip file and put it on the Kindle. Don't unzip it.

10) Turn off your Kindle, and follow the instructions in this video to boot into TWRP, clear the data and caches, and flash the ROM.

11) Reboot, wait a while, and eventually ICS will come up!

Notes:

I had the Sleep of Death issue most people have with the EnergyROM, where it would freeze every time I turned off the screen. To fix it, I used intersectRaven's Kernel (direct link to the latest ICS version is here). Flash it like you did the EnergyROM by putting it on the SD card and going into TWRP, but without doing the erases.

Now I've only had it crash on me once since then.

Sometimes when using KFU (Steps 5, 6 and 7), Windows would lose track of the Kindle as it rebooted and reset itself, and thus wouldn't enumerate as an ADB device, and thus cause KFU to get stuck waiting. KFU typically prints out a message saying if nothing happens, to reboot your Kindle (hold the power button for 10 seconds to turn off, then press it again to turn on). I had to do this a few times during this process. Though note that one time it explicitly said NOT to turn it off, so just follow what the prompts say.

ICS on the Kindle doesn't support Netflix or Hulu+ or HD Youtube videos. This makes me sad, but worth the trade-off to me. And the fix is being worked on!

Useful app since Kindle doesn't have a volume slider: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=rubberbigpepper.VolumeControl

How to get Swype installed on ICS.

The hardest part of doing this was sorting through all the thousands of ways to do the above. Everyone does it slightly differently, with different terminology, and with old instructions for outdated programs (ie the Kernel thread's original post install instructions are outdated and don't make sense to a newbie). So hopefully this post helped someone else struggling right now.