Taking your points individually:

There are still varying results regarding how best to load up a blank player with a large music collection. There are two sub-topics to this:

1) For organization, the conventional wisdom is still to do artist/album structure, and to make sure that your PC's hard disk mirrors this desired structure.

2) For the issue of the quantity of music to try loading at once, people have still been getting mixed results. Some people seem fine with loading a huge amount of music at once, others need to break it up into smaller chunks to keep the player or the management software from crashing.

Jemplode or Emplode? I'm fine with using emplode 2.00 final for all my player management. Jemplode is also known to work well.

No IP address might be a hardware fault, or it might be something simple with the dock. Try plugging the ethernet cable and the power directly into the player, also make sure it's in AC/Home mode, and see if it gets a DHCP address. It also might be hub issue: Some hubs and switches don't play nice with the player.

Hardware faults, if in fact yours turns out to be one, can still be repaired.