The rosserial blink tutorial (http://www.ros.org/wiki/rosserial_arduino/Tutorials/Blink) works as expected when connecting to an Arduino Uno with an XBee using the following command:

rosrun rosserialxbee xbeenetwork.py /dev/ttyUSB0 2

However, if I try to use rosserialpython instead of rosserialxbee (as in the tutorial example):

rosrun rosserialpython serialnode.py /dev/ttyUSB0

I get an initial response saying:

ROS Serial Python Node

Connected on /dev/ttyUSB0 at 57600 baud

And eventually the classic:

Lost sync with device, restarting...

I have made the changes recommended in this support ticket (https://kforge.ros.org/rosserial/trac/ticket/73) to be sure that it is actually connecting instead of just throwing the message that rosserial_python has connected before it even tries. I also switched down to 1 core on Virtualbox so Ubuntu it would find the XBee USB device in the first place.

Further, I have noticed that running the rosserialpython command does not light up the RSSI light on my Parallax USB XBee adapter as it doesn't when I run rosserialxbee. And that the rostopic /toggleled does not show up in the "rostopic list" after I try running the "rostopic pub toggleled" command.