I also USB splitter from China in between. Since my problems were related to the USB recognition, could that have caused some of my issues.
Yes. Bad cables, hubs or even USB ports are frequently causing issues. Remove all of those.
I have to make an observation. It seems that when rockbox writes to disk it wants to stay. I reinstalled the Sandisk original drivers but it still boots RB but will go into Sandisk format. Also I still can't format or erase the SD card that RB used while in the player.
This doesn't make sense -- there are no Sandisk drivers, and there are no Rockbox drivers. When connected to the PC the player presents itself as mass storage device, for which Windows (and Linux and OS X as well) already include drivers.
I assume you're talking about the actual firmware here. If you update the e200 with a firmware file that has the Rockbox bootloader added it will (of course) boot Rockbox. If you want to get rid of Rockbox you need to update it with an unmodified Sandisk firmware file. I suggest to download it from Sandisk again, since your problem pretty much sounds like you're mixing up files.