[Nexus 7 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] bigooze:
Right... I spent the last 6 hours reading through the forum and Googling about this problem. I learnt a lot (!), but cannot solve the problem, and I now hope someone can help me :)

Sorry for the lenghty post, but there's a lot of information to share...

Yesterday, my long-awaited Nexus 7 (8Gb) finally arrived. It worked just fine for an hour or so: I got online without any issue, Calendar, Photos, GMail and Contacts were nicely synching and I was really starting to get impressed about the speed and features.

I did download a couple apps, more specifically Aldiko & Moon+ Reader ebook reader apps, and Facebook).

Suddenly --I believe I just started the Facebook app-- the screen turned black and showed strange stripes. The device rebooted and got stuck on the black screen with the white "Google" text. I let it sit there for a while and then instinctively tried to power-off the device by holding the power button for 10 seconds or so. It did indeed reboot, but when the tablet booted up, it popped back to the black Google screen and just sat there.

FYI: The USB cable was connected all of the time, and the first time I plugged the Nexus in, my Win 7 64bit machine recognized the tablet and loaded the drivers for it.

When it got stuck, I decided to continue charging it, thinking that maybe the battery wasn't fully charged and the cause of the problem. I hooked it up to the official charger in a wall socket and let it sit there for a while, while I started searching the web for a solution. After about 30 minutes, when I had read about the power+volume button combination, I tried this combination (until then the Google page showed for more than 30 minutes). The Nexus indeed showed the Fastboot screen, and I had to plug it back in the PC's USB to get the buttons "start", "recovery mode", "power off" and "restart bootloader" working. None of them had any effect.

The fastboot screen showed the product name "grouper", the lock state as "locked"; the bootloader as version 3.34 and the HW version as ER3.

I downloaded the "Nexus root toolkit" from WugFresh and tried to flash it back to "stock" with Android 4.1.1 JRO03D. The tool did show my serial number, btw.... Until then, I had good hopes, but then it went wrong: the tool downloaded the files, unpacked them and said something about "wiping flash" and everything froze. After about 20 minutes, I concluded it had locked-up and unplugged the device.

It now seems to be completely "bricked"...

I can no longer get to the fastboot screen; Not even with the 3-button trick... it always shows the Google screen and immediately shows the "dead robot" screen with the exclamation mark.

The Nexus does not start up Android, so I cannot activate ADB/ USB debugging...

The device is no longer recognized by my PC; the PC doesn't make the "USB hooked up/disconnected" sound anymore

I tried uninstalling the drivers and installed the "naked drivers", no solution -- they show up with yellow exclamation marks

I installed the SDK, and "fastboot.exe devices" shows nothing

I downloaded the "Nexus 7 Toolkit 2.0"; I cannot access the tablet, no serials show, drivers cannot be installed

FYI: I did not try to root it or unlock it. I rebooted my PC, I power-cycled the Nexus, I changed USB ports, sigh...

I'm afraid I actually bricked my device... If so indeed, and given the fact that I cannot access the device with any of the tools/toolkits, is there anything I can do to put it back to factory settings?