[Jon Stratis]

Had you grounded the DS according to the instructions prior to that? From what we could tell, most (if not all) of the teams with problems had their stations properly grounded. Additionally, with the extremely dry air in the stadium and the lack of much carpet, it doesn't seem like a static shock to the dongle would be very likely, especially for so many teams.

One thought we just had was the practice arena - there is a little carpet around the edges here, and we all know those wheels when run on carpet can generate a ton of static electricity. Thinking hypothetically here (as we have no way to test this that i can think of), what if the robot generated some static and that somehow got transmitted down the ethernet cable (when you're unplugging it it hits the frame, for example)? Shocks like that are why you wear a grounding bracelet when working on circuit boards...