Okay, I think I'm a little closer to resolving the issue. I reflashed with chinook and realized that not all of my flash drives worked correctly. So apparently I tried some "new" flash drives under diablo and incorrectly figured that they had worked with chinook.

Then I reflashed with diablo, and eventually managed to get all of the flash drives which worked with chinook to also work with diablo. I say "eventually" because I had to plug/unplug the flash drives a couple of times before diablo recognized them. This was not the case with chinook.

So I think the title of the thread should be "Diablo SLIGHTLY less tolerant" since I managed to get the same drives working under diablo (with a little fiddling).

As to the wired network issue, I also cannot get my ethernet adapter to work. But as stated in other posts, until the DUMMY interface issue can be hacked around, I don't think I can effectively debug it.