so i asked speeddymon how he got the user to catch the updatezip or whatever and this is his direct quote
I walked him through installing the SDK, including ADB, the USB Debugging driver, enabling USB Debugging, and running logcat. Then had him run logcat and hit the install button. It said it was going to install /cache/signed-voles-ese81-from-esd56.fa406da6.zip so I deduced that the filename would be the same on the android.clients.google.com site and that the location would be the same. It was.
So I downloaded the file and told him to pull the battery from his phone (which didn't work, it already has the file downloaded to /cache by the time you get the notification, so once you tell it to install, that's it, you are going to get 2.1 and no turning back).
It would have been easier if he had not taken his phone back to stock yesterday, I could have had him just give me the file name from /cache but since he took root off, he couldnt read /cache, so I had no choice. :-( Oh well, he said he was done with root anyways so he didn't mind.