If you're sure it only happens at work, my first shot-in-the-dark guess is that it would be somehow related to the increased traffic on your work LAN. Displayserver and/or the empeg's TCP software might be responding to more requests on your work LAN than they would on your home LAN. As I understand the way these thing works, even if the requests weren't intended for the empeg, its software still has to process them in a limited way. Perhaps Displayserver can't handle that on a busy lan with a lot of broadcast tracffic? Frank, do you have any insights?

You are right in the way that the software(IP-stack) will filter all broadcast traffic for processing, but if the destination port is not responding, no real processing takes place. I've run about 10 copies of empegapplet at the same time, on the busy company-network, without any problems. Maybe a high collision-rate could cause the problems?
Another cause which is costing trouble-shooters a lot of time lately, is the use of intruder-detection software or HTTP virus-scanners. I've seen problems where such a program was causing failing drive-mounts ( blackice ). I spent a lot of time figuring that one out. Blackice bad, very bad... If you want some code to get a good laugh from blackice-users, mail me

I don't know if winamp uses the general proxy-settings, I know mediaplayer does. Have you checked the proxy settings?
As for the cold boot thing: I guess the company you work for has a switched network with multiple VLANs defined. In combination with DHCP, this can cause some time to happen to let switches "learn" MAC-addresses and let them spread this knowledge between all switches.

Frank van Gestel