Er, it's not that I hadn't used my radio in some time, but I hadn't used it from the time I upgraded to 2.0b11. That is, here was the sequence of events from Friday:

Listen to radio under 2.0b7
Un-dock Empeg from car
Come inside and find out that 2.0b11 is released
Jump up and down excitedly
Plug in my Empeg at home
Run the 2.0b11 upgrade
Flash the hijack kernel
Play with some new 2.0b11 features
Check out Seek Info Mode, see that it's still frozen

Then this morning I found out about the Aux-in workaround, and that seemed to work. Then I drove into work, listened to my Empeg in the car, and seek mode seemed to be working. Now I come into work and turn it on and the seek info is frozen again. I *think* I was in tuner mode when I took my Empeg out of my car, but I'm not certain.

Maybe Toby S. has more insight on how to reliably reproduce this, I never noticed any pattern before.