The problem is almost certainly in the PC, not the empeg, and may be an incompatibility between emplode and my particular hardware configuration.

I'm not so sure the problem is on the PC. When I watched it, it did look like the Empeg just decides to reboot half way through, Emplode doesn't have any idea that's what happened and freezes waiting for Empeg to respond.

I'm willing to give the suggestion a try, but I'm not sure how I'm supposed to convince the Empeg to continue through the shell prompt.