well, the failure mode is now quite different. i got a panic which i assumed meant the kernel had given up, but as i was typing this i got a timeout message from ipconfig. something's still running, clearly. unfortunately, most of the content scrolled off the top when i got a dumpstack from whatever it was that crashed ("panic: fault: 0x11c" mean anything to anyone?) - i'll get a serial console hooked up tomorrow (while not cooking) and capture the full print.
there's still no fossil running, though; perhaps that's what crashed. anthony