Does anyone know if there's a trick to this?

According to the documentation, I'm supposed to be hitting the Esc key when I see the Loading "flash:/[imagename]" ####### ... line, but this doesn't seem to be working.  I've tried hitting the Esc key a lot during those lines, holding it down, hitting it early, hitting it late, hitting it in the middle, and still no joy.  I'm wanting to hit it with something very heavy and hard about now, but I doubt that'll do anything but cause more problems.  Anyone know what I could be doing wrong here?

I'm trying to break into a handful of malfunctioning 1242AG APs to see if I can get them working, or if they're faulting hardware that's beyond repair.  (So far they're all coming back with: no "IP_ADDR" variable set, so if anyone knows how to set that without breaking out of the boot cycle, that would be helpful too.)