Oh my goodness.

*LIGHT BULB GOES ON*

Now I remember what the problem was.

If you plugged in the Karma *cold*, you would get the steady traffic light and no ethernet connection (some brands of switch only). Then if you used USB to synch and the Karma warmed up, THEN it would START working on ethernet.

THAT was the hardware problem I was referring to, that I couldn't remember right.

So your long-ethernet-synch lockup is not related to the problem I was thinking all along. It's something totally different.