[Fire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] FrankieChen:
Thank you for the replies. Sorry not to have responded earlier, I had a busy few days and although I have spent a lot of hours trying to read through the forums and find out about twrp, this is the 1st opportunity I have had to get back to trying to resolve the problem.

If I understand correctly, DoLooper has suggested sideloading an update bin file. (3820). I just started trying to do this but as the file to be downloaded is over 600MB and I am on a very slow connection it's showing it's going to take between 7-8 hours to download. If I take this option I will need to wait until tomorrow when I can get to a faster internet.

Pond-life, you have suggested that I

1. "use the reboot to bootloader option"

I'm presuming that this means that I have to select this option from the recovery screen on the tablet - does the tablet have to be attached to the pc via the USB cable when I select the option?

What should I expect once I have selected this option?

Would the tablet not need to be rooted to access the bootloader (as it isn't)?

2. "set pc up with fastboot and see if it can be booted into twrp by fastboot"

When I 1st got the tablet I had difficulties getting the adb drivers to install on my pc and after several days of trying I ended up doing it on another pc which I no longer have access to.

I have tried again to reinstall the drivers using rootjunkies file but again without success. I tried doing it using that method as I remember trying to do it that way (what felt like a billion times) though I don't remember if I finally ended up succeeding with that method or another.

I followed your link "http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=63635664&postcount=9" and tried the 1st method

"[TOOL] [WINDOWS] ADB, Fastboot and Drivers - 15 seconds ADB Installer v1.4.3 by Snoop05"

running the "adb-setup-1.4.3.exe" I get "0 files copied" after selecting "Yes to install ADB system-wide" which I recall was the problem (zero files copied) that I had previously.

Openning Device Manager after this does show any Fire or Android devices even when the tablet is connected so I'm assuming that the adb driver installation is failing.

I tried again with "adb-setup-1.3.exe". This time I had 4 files copied and got fire listed in the device manager but when I tried to update the driver I am not given the Android option in the list when I select the option to install driver.

I googled to see if anyone else had this error and I found that some peoplehad difficulties installing on XP but seems that MTP not being supported is the reason and it is resolved by installing WMP v10 and above. I have v11 so presume that's not the problem.

I don't have access to another computer at the moment to try and install the adb drivers but should be able to use another one tomorrow. Last time when I got the drivers to install it was on a vista machine so I wondered if that might have something to do with it.

The other thing that occurred to me was maybe there is something wrong with the cable as I only get the fire shown in the device manager for a few moments before it refreshes and then the fire is no longer shown.

I wondered if I should try to use USBDeview (as per http://www.inlovewithandroid.com/android-usb-connection-problems.html) to see if that is the problem. Certainly if I can the drivers installed on another pc it might suggest that there's a problem with mine.

Anyway, if I get the adb drivers to install successfully on another pc, could you explain what I am trying to do by "booted into twrp by fastboot"? Sorry to be so useless!

Huge thanks