Strange issue with pushing code and running it on 2016 firmware

[SLAB-Mr.Thomas]

We are having similar problems. Seems like these are all the same thing as this:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...=no+robot+code
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...=no+robot+code
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...=no+robot+code

The first deploy attempts behaved a little differently and I can't reproduce the strange errors. This is what the system has settled into:

Open NetConsole or RLog or both.
Open driver station.
Close Smart dashboard that had opened automatically with driver station.
Open Eclipse and deploy - successful.
See that our looping printf's in RobotInit are printing continuously as they should be (waiting for Preferences from Smart Dashboard, actually, is our code) although driver station says no robot code.
Open Smart Dashboard manually and notice that the communications status indicator remains green at all times.
Notice that the printing from RobotInit stops at the instant smart dashboard (c++ or the default dashboard) starts.

It is frustrating that driver station says no robot code and doesn't allow changing to enable/disable although the code is running at the time!

For other experiments, depending on the timing of starting the deploy and starting driver station you can observe the the driver station communications green "light" goes on at exactly the same time that the roboRIO comm LED goes red.

The very first attempts were confusing with the smart dashboard widgets being updated with the fields Put by RobotInit but that couldn't be reproduced even after reimaging the roboRIO.

Sorry this is not much help except to encourage FIRST to take a close look and fix this ASAP. We are dead!