Well, took Matt Devo's advice from the XBMC forum linked above. My TV wasn't synching up fast enough and when I hit CTRL-D from the moment I turned on the Chromebox, instead of waiting for the display, it got me into the OS far enough that I could CTRL-SHFT-F2. Anyway, followed his guide from there and got stuck again, even worse this time.
Anyway, after messing with 4 different flash drives, I finally stuck the bootable OpenELEC on a MicroSD card with adapter. I discovered that if I stuck that MicroSD card in along with the Chrome OS recovery image on Flash Drive and then booted with the paper clip in the reset hole then I had about 2 seconds to hit the ESC button and get the list of 3 bootable choices. I was able to then install from the SD card. This time it took.
Boots right into XBMC from the HDD and is running really smooth. For some reason the box just wouldn't recognize any of the flash drives as bootable. I must have not set up the boot configuration very well. I don't know. I could have sworn that I checked and double checked along the way.
Anyway, pretty pleased so far. I have a FLIRC as the IR receiver paired with my Logitech Harmony and I still need to get the delay settings correct, there's some pretty bad lag, but I should be able to get ironed out.
Thanks for the help.