Okay, thanks for the suggestions and info. At this point I am more convinced it is hardware than ever. Yesterday I tried again remotely to install the transmission port. Partway through I lost connectivity and when I got home I had to manually power down the box because it was locked up (no errors on screen or anything, either).
After I brought it back up I ran the install again, and it completed this time (not properly, I've really made a mess of ports it seems. But it did finish without locking up the box.) So there you have it - a random issue, which tells me hardware.
Ugh, I hate hardware problems more than anything.
I'll do what I can to clean up the guts of the thing (it's been running solid for a long time... although I did put another RAM chip in there a few months ago... hmm...) and run memtest. I'll also review the documentation on upgrading ports some more - obviously I haven't understood it properly so far.
I imagine the Transmission issue will have to wait until I figure out my hardware problem. Thanks again, to both of you!
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