ISTR that this was a problem with the USB chip on the mk1. It shouldn't, therefore, affect the mark2 in any way.

Ah, that makes sense.

Okay, then, what about this:

Remember that once upon a time, there was a bug in one of the 1.1 alphas where if you sent too many characters on one line into the serial port, the player would crash? Perhaps this is something similar that Tod's noticing because his serial port is doing garbage at reboot time?