Hello - I don’t know whether this of any help, but I have a USB to serial cable that I use to talk to the stalker. I too got all sorts of errors when trying to upload sketches.
After MUCH searching and wild goose chases, I found that the following technique worked EVERY time:
After pressing the ‘upload’ button, and wait until the message “Binary sketch …” appears. At that instant, press the reset button on the stalker and release. If you hesitate, it will not work, and you have to wait for all the error messages to appear before trying again. After a bit of practice, you can do it every time.
It’s a pain, but I got used to it. I too thought I had a faulty board, but I suspect that it might be an incompatibility with the USB converter.
According to this page: arduino.cc/en/Main/MiniUSB
Right next to the 2 gnd on the upper row (seen on your pic)
Hope it helps, i’m just using the manual reset. But it’s annoying when it spams serial data so the upload fails :-/ (Then i just upload a blink skech, and try again )