Well no one helped me out but after hours of frustration and various errors with many different firmware versions I finally got my router updated with the following method:
1) Tracked down SMC firmware 1.93p and hex edited BR193P.BIN at address 00004008H to read Winnie instead of SMC001 (that changes the R-Data to Winnie after you update with that bin).
2) Turned 7004BR off, shorted pins 3 and 8 with a screwdriver, turned it on and held it until orange light M1 flashed rapidly (crash recovery mode).
3) At a command prompt in XP in the 1.93p firmware directory I typed:
tftp -i 192.168.123.254 put br193p.bin
This uploads the hex edited firmware.
4) At this point you can probably go to Eusso 1.95J (ANA195J.EXE) using crash recovery, but I did crash recovery and went to Amit 1.94A (ANB194A.EXE), then crash recovery to go to 1.95J.
5) I was then able to go to 1.96h3 by running 196h3.exe.
Since no one is around anymore I've read virtually every post on this forum about going to 1.96h3 and I've found out the following:
1) You can do crash recovery and resetting and firmware updates till the cows come home, but you'll never get to 1.96h3 until your router sysinfo (192.168.123.254/sysinfo.htm) R-data shows "Winnie" instead of SMC001.
2) The people saying they did this and that and it worked with X number of barricades must have had Winnie in their R-data field all along. How it got there I can only guess must have been from an old firmware that actually changed R-data to Winnie. I just tried about a dozen different firmware versions on my barricade and not ONE of them put Winnie into the R-data field no matter how I updated the firmware (and I tried TFTP, EXE, and .BIN web update).
3) Many people couldn't update to 1.96h3 and had the same problem as I did...I assume that's because their R-Data was like mine and wouldn't change from SMC001. My method works for sure because you're forcing it to Winnie.
I'm including an attachment with all the firmwares that took me weeks to locate and what is needed for the above procedure. Included in the zip are Amit 1.94A and 1.95J, Eusso 1.93S and 1.95J and 1.96H3, SMC 1.93P (hex edited Winnie and original), and SMC 1.96H2.