Nope. "stalk_enabled=0" didn't solve it. I kinda thought it wouldn't, as I never saw any other weird behavior. The only thing that goes wrong is that sometimes the player is asleep on startup. Occasionally, it'll reawaken at a later ignition time (never just driving around, though) even if I didn't awaken it by hand before. This indicates to me that it's not remembering a state, but that there's something wrong at each individual boot.

Is it possible that too-low voltage somewhere could cause the player to sleep on boot? Like maybe there's enough power to turn the player on, but by the time it gets the player app running it's too low? Could someone out there (whose player works properly) try turning their ignition on, wait for the empeg to start booting, then cut it off again before the player app starts and see what happens? If it goes to sleep, I'll check the voltage on my ignition line.