Hi, I'm glad you managed to edit oztivo.conf. I was listing the commands from memory, I may have go the syntax wrong for the sysinit.conf file.
Type ls once you are in the /etc directory, to see what files are there. You may need to issue the command cp ./default.sysinit.conf ./syinit.conf to copy the default config file to the editable one. The ./ means 'this directory' that you are currently in.
Also try joe /etc/sysinit.conf to make sure it is looking in the correct location.

Ethernet cables can be up to 100m long. Don't know about your ISP, you reckon the connection is solid, but they may be doing some transparent caching that could stuff things up. Changing to port 9090 and turning off emuproxy should solve your problems though.