APR tuning gone wrong... (A6 C5 4.2)
 

Just wanted to share my recent experience with APR.

I brought my lady to an authorized APR dealer to have a stage 1 tuning done with a testpipe version (also known as cat-detele). I was thrilled when I heard they had that option for stage 1 and since I get intermittent CEL's from removing the cats I figured this would be great to finally get rid of the horrible check engine light.
So first visit when I got there it turns out that my particular computer had no testpipe file - only stage 1. I emailed APR and within 1 hour they added another file with a testpipe version for my ECU.
Next day I go to the dealer again and have him flash my car ... after a while I get worried that it's still not finished (stuck at 9%). A couple of error messages later and the flashing FAILED! ECU is dead and car won't start anymore.
I waited for the dealer to contact APR and he they had walk through some nonsense troubleshooting trying to finish the flash but the ECU just refused. Bottom line is he has to ship my ECU to the APR HQ and have them manually flash it with some machine that can force the overwrite/flash.

So now I have no car until early next week when the ECU ships back :( ... a quick email to APR to complain about my experience reveals that my particular engine and ECU is almost always this troublesome (per the tech) and that I should have expected there could be complications. Well, thanks for the hindsight!