Well, I'm finally stumped... v.WTF?

[Six_Shooter]

Well, today I went to tune an '89 Cavalier with a hybrid (frankenstein) 60 degree V6...

Engine looks to be well put together, and the owner has taken a lot of time to make it a very clean install.

It uses a '7730, with $6D (Due to vacuum EGR), which I'm quite familiar with.

The owner bought an Ostrich 2.0 and ALDL Xtreme, so we unpackaged those items, connected everything, uploaded the BIN, turned the key on, CEL blinks, good, checked ALDL connection, good. I changed the Mask ID to AA to disable the checksum for emulation. I made an adjustment to the injector constant, which when started seems to have good results, having the cold start about 12:1, instead of 10:1. So we let it warm up a bit, I make a few tweaks to the injector constant, just to try and lean it out a bit more, it does.

Once warmed up, I tried to adjust the idle and main VE tables, with ZERO response from the engine. So I made larger changes, still zero effect. Adjusted both tables drastically, both up and down, zero effect. After a bit decided to try $A1, with the EXACT SAME results. No changes in the VE or even timing tables had any effect on the WBO2 reading or how the engine ran at all. So I went back to $6D to try and figure out what is going on, since $A1 won't be proper anyway, due to the vacuum EGR. I tried for another 2 and a half hours or so with a complete failure on the ability to tune this car.

I can make any changes to a scaler and it has the expected effect, however changing any tables has zero effect. I tried 2 different Ostrich 2.0s, 2 different ECMs, with no change in the symptoms. I even unplugged the Ostrich while the engine was running to prove that it was indeed running off the Ostrich, engine stumbled and died (LHM will not be close enough due to injector size and fuel pressure), so it was for sure reading the Ostrich contents. I also downloaded the contents of the Ostrich a few times to make sure that the uploaded changes were indeed uploaded to the Ostrich.

So to recap:

ECM: '7730
Mask: $6D ($A1 also tested)
Ostrich 2.0 (tried 2 of them)
Tried 2 different ECMs
Tuner Pro RT
XDF that was downloaded from this site today, since I didn't seem to have one on my laptop.
Can change scalers with changes to the engine (though not as directly as I would have expected), but any table changes had zero effect.

I plan to setup my test bench and see if I can replicate the problem, while observing the outputs via oscilloscope, and any other tools I need to use.

Any ideas out there?