I have a ESP-88 and it was on FW 4.62. By mistake i opened it with CS 3.2 and upgraded to 3.2 FW. By the time i realised that I have clicked wrongly, it was already upgrading - downgrading to FW 3.2.
Now after reboot, the status light is RED and it won't ping default ip 192.168.0.160.
So you are able to see the ESP-88 via IP in CSD (hardware manager) but it won't complete the firmware update? What does it say/do? Do you get a specific error? What version of CSD are you using?
The issue of communicating with the device vs updating are two very different problems.