OK, well this issue never was able to be solved BUT I found the answer! Was running XP still on a pretty nice machine and after years of sketchiness, which was always so weird forum searches/Yaobing could never figure it out I began to wonder if XP was a big contributor to this. Then I designed a home theater for a client who is a software debugger for all of the big players including Microsoft and we started talking HTPC. He suggested right off that I migrate to Windows 7, mentioning that MS had completely rebuilt all of the networking "stacks" in 7, etc.
Well, got some courage and did it one better-I just went straight to Windows 8 as an early adopter, it was the economical way to go, was a bit concerned it might now work at all but did it anyway. I have to recommend Win 8 as a great OS for running J River. Depending on your control scenario I even like the app-type new desktop interface, pretty clean and low resource use, very easy to configure. I control the PC via a URC MX-450 RF remote using an IR adapter on the PC. To do this, I needed to write a little script to kick Win 8 over to a traditional desktop upon bootup so my macros, etc would work from the remote. Other than that, simple install out of the box. Bottom line is that Windows 8 seems to be a great OS with J River and and migrating to it eliminated a lot of the quirky unreliability I was experiencing with my HTPC.