Wired News has a short interview with Glenn Reeves, the Mars Exploration Rover flight software architect.

During one window, we're running a script on the vehicle to tell us which piece of software in the system is causing that reset problem. We've tried that for two days, but so far haven't been successful.

In another, we're trying to dump parts of the 224-MB flash file system back down to Earth, so we can reconstruct the system here. But think about it -- on a good day, we can only transmit less than 5 MB, so moving the whole file means a lot of days with no additional science. We'd prefer to avoid that path, but it's a contingency plan.

In that third window, we try to communicate with the orbiter.

Since we can bring up the system in “cripple mode,” we're doing integrity checks manually. But this takes a lot of time, because we like to do them one by one, in order.

We can't waste any effort, or time. You could say our dialup service is really, really, really slow. It takes forever to get anything back and forth.