That's an issue between the USB-serial chip and your PC, the ESP32 doesn't have anything to do with this and 'factory resetting' won't solve your problem. I don't know enough about Windows drivers to say more; perhaps you need to reinstall the driver or something?

I think that's all part of the lower level MAC/PHY code, and we haven't open-sourced or publicly documented that.

You're likely runnning into issues wrt how the partitions on the chip are defined. In Arduino, you can probably change that under Tools > Partition scheme.

Fwiw, you could also move over to newer chips like the ESP32S3, which have an internal USB-serial-JTAG adapter.

espefuse is a Python script that you can also use as a library in your own Python scripts. Technically I don't think we promise anything about the API we provide there, but I imagine it's going to be more stable (and visible if it breaks) than parsing the output.

The flash generally supports 100000 erases per sector before it wears out and shows errors. How many writes you get out of that depends on what you store and how the wear leveling algorithm behind it does.

That would be the main flash; you can look at the examples/storage/spiffs example to store data there.

So, 'external' SPI flash in this context means a SPI flash chip other than the main flash that contains the program itself. Is that what you intended? If so, did you actually hook up an external flash chip?

Looks like memory corruption, and unfortunately that's not trivial to backtrace. I'd suggest taking a long hard look at your code, see if you're overflowing a buffer somewhere.

Making a function a constructor calls it as soon as the program starts up, even before main() is called. You then *also* call the function in main.