Thanks both!
On the ATA cable I was meaning more from a stability point of view on the balanced cabling rather than from a performance standpoint. Placing even a decent DVD-ROM drive on a controller tends to yeild a better advertised capability in the PC's BIOS setup with an 80 conductor cable than placing it on a standard 40 wire one. I was thinking that was due to better signalling integrity (ie. SNR and clocking) being seen by the drive.
I'm probably talking bollocks :D
I read in another thread that some (this may have been limited to UK Thomsons) had better luck/stability running 2.5.5 software than 3.0. Is that a desireable downgrade or irrelevant to a Philips US model?
I think that if from now on, I see I still have some form of management of the TiVo (since the NIC timing change) during a 'crash', that I'll write a watchdog to reboot either the whole OS or reload those components which need it. Being a relative newbie of course, I'll need to research a whole lot into the various process IDs which operate remote, UI, output video etc for the latter.
That's what this kind of a project is all about after all!