Ok, completely uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled, swapped out the USB cable and now its working.
The utility didn't even ask me to put it in update mode it just updated it. Working great now.
Had I troubleshot this in stages I could have identified the specific problem, but I believe it was the USB cable- I don't think the reboot made a difference.
The cable I tried first had two chokes on it like in this pic:
The second I tested didn't have any ferrite chokes like that and it just worked:
Just to be clear I'm not entirely sure the cable I first tried itself was not bad- I didn't test it with another device to confirm.