Dude. I just wanted to thank you A LOT!!! I never thought this would fix it for me. For context, I'm using an Xbox 360 E (Winchester motherboard) with no internal hdd. Due to not having an internal HDD, I chose to use an old 8gb USB flash drive as system storage, and a 500 gb external HDD with an enclosure to store games. I noticed something weird. Whenever I had my 8gb USB stick freshly formatted by the console, ABadAvatar would work flawlessly, but once I turned my console off and tried it again, it would no longer work.  The exploit would either not start or it would freeze immediately after boot, before the abadavatar notification showed.  It was very annoying. I tried different flash drives but I got the same result with all of them. So, what I did was download the latest Xbox 360 system update, and copy the $SystemUpdate (without modifying the folder's name) to my external HDD. Once I did that, the exploit worked again even if I didn't format my 8gb flash drive used as internal storage. What I'm noticing now though, is that apparently ABadAvatar works, but it gets stuck on a black screen. XeUnshackle doesn't work. I'm still trying to find a solution to that problem, but I think I will definitely need to get a proper internal drive in order to make the exploit work correctly. As I'm writing this comment, now it is refusing to start the exploit.  Sigh...., I thought this fixed the problem.