Can I assume that the infinite loop that can be formed if only 'Eastern Crows' are left in Encounter deck and 'Thalin' is Questing, can be broken by the wording of 'Eastern Crows' saying DEFEATED not DESTROYED?  Therefore they are only returned to deck if DEFEATED in Combat.  Cheers!

How would that make an infinite loop ? You only add 1 card per player. Once its drawn and in this case defeated you move on to counting willpower in the end of the quest phase. You don't keep adding cards to the staging area until one stays.

So Thalin quests, shadow deck draws a card per player, one of them is eastern crows, eastern crows dies and goes away, players count willpower and compare to threat in staging area then add progress tokens or move up threat and move on to travel phase.

Eastern Crows gets shuffled back in, so if there are say, 2 of them in the encounter deck and nothing else, then they would just constantly go back into it.  I don't think its an infinite loop though, because if you kill them with Thalin's ability, they don't activate Surge.

yep, surge isn't activated so loop avoided.

This is covered in the FAQ thread

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=201&efcid=4&efidt=479840

 I thought you were going to talk about letting the crows attack Gloin undefended  forever while your teammate is playing a lore deck.