Carl-Daniel and friends,
Thank you for your help I'm back up and running with my asus p4p800se. This is what i needed to do: my initial attempt with ubuntu 10.4 packaged flashrom-0.9.1+r946-1ub obviously didn't work. the flashrom-0.9.2 release didn't look too promising(I ran it but got pretty much the same results) so I went for the SVN head checkout at r1180.
I got the warning "WARNING: Your mainboard is ASUS P4P800, but the mainboard-specific code has not been tested, and thus will not not be executed by default. Depending on your hardware environment, erasing, writing or even probing can fail without running the board specific code." So i went ahead with
flashrom -Vw P4P800SE-ASUS-1012.001 -p internal:boardenable=force> flashrom_Vw092pcurrent.txt
I'm attaching some files with output from that last command and lspci and superiotool hoping it will be useful to you.
Thanks again for your help, and for the working you're doing on this project.
....maki....