seen as though I am putting in my solutions today I thought that I'd add the solution that worked to this problem too
I serially connected to the host issued a reset and during the reset (at the point when size was being calculated) I used the following code to break into the host:

$session->expect(20, "Size:");
$session->send("\030");
[download]

simple really. The ascii codekey seemed to work for ctrl+x and this seemed to be the only thing that worked.