I could have sworn that mlord was complaining about this in relation to his home docking station.

Edit: Oops. Nope. It was something else:

The Empeg boot firmware (runs before kernel) performs a "power source" test, and skips the "kernel download" check if running from "DC" power.. or if running from "AC" power supplied via the docking connector. This means I cannot do kernel updates while docked!!