[ericand]

The key to soliving the problem that was showing up last year (with symptoms similar to yours) was the change in the linker script. The 8.2-8.3 problem was found by our team to be temperature sensitive (occuring more often when the processor was cold, and less when it was warm).

The problem seemed to occur when the memory used by txdata and rxdata (the memory used to communicate between the master controller and the slave controller) was in the memory section adjacent to the hardware registers. The linker script patch makes that piece of RAM protected so it is not used (and the memory used for communication is moved away from the hardware registers).