I managed to reproduce it about 10 times and have yet to determine exactly what it is that I'm doing to break it. I believe it has something to do with the temporary files it creates on the Z drive.
I have been able to cause the problem much faster by creating a dummy file which I renamed to skin.zip and placed on the Z drive. If you time this right during the background refresh, you can make one of two problems occur. Depending on the timing, you should be able to cause it to display the default skin background immediately or you might see 1 or 2 (rarely more) pictures before it either gets stuck on a picture, or goes back to the default background again.
When this problem occurs, you can fix the problem most of the time by:
- disabling the random skin settings
- delete the skin*.* files off the Z drive
- power off the xbox using the power switch (do not use the reboot or power off options from the dashboard)
- power back up the xbox
- re-enable the random skin
If you use the reboot option from the dashboard, the problem usually comes back right away even if you cleared the Z drive. A manual power off/on seems to clear it out better. Also, once the picture gets stuck or you get stuck back at the default skin background, it seems to keep something in memory which prevents you from fixing it without first powering down the box.
None of this is 100% consistant, so try a few times or try doing things in a different order, but I'm pretty confident the joker will be able to reproduce the problem and KAC will be able to fix the problem (at least temporarily).
the joker, I tried to save off the UDATA/TDATA, avalaunch.xml and all files on the Z drives at different points where it was working and not working to compare but couldn't really find anything related to the files themselves being the specific cause of the problem.