Here's what I know...
I worked on about a dozen of these particular FMS-fail to connect cases at official events with the full FMS. That's why I'd like to hear more reports from other areas of the FRC world to see what patterns others saw.
Under competition circumstances we're just trying to get them operating again, so we don't get much opportunity to study the problem. We just try to make it go away as fast as possible. I never had the time to try it against FMS-lite. I meant to do so in Atlanta, but my laptops were all tied up when the opportunity arose.
- It seemed to manifest when the Classmate woke from sleep, but only a small percentage of Classmates suffered.
- Once it started, rebooting did not improve the problem.
- It can be fixed by restoring the Classmate to KOP as-delivered (~2 hours).
- It can be fixed by a bizarre use of the restore stick (~2 minutes).
I can't say that restoring prevented the problem from coming back. Standard advice quickly became "don't ever let it go to sleep."
When some of them did go to sleep again the problem did return, but that's a very subjective observation and I wouldn't put any faith in it without collecting less-subjective samples.
There were a lot of cases at the week 1 NJ Regional, but I didn't see a single one at the 4th week SBPLI Regional. One big difference is that most teams at SBPLI had them on constant power or shut them down completely while waiting in the queue. By week 4 the sleep problems had been widely reported and teams weren't letting them sleep.
You saw one of these in Atlanta with team 192 in the Curie pits, I think it was.
Taking 192 as an example, they reportedly worked fine with FMS at their regional, but failed to connect to FMS during the Championship Thursday practices. It was fixed at the field and tested fine with FMS. We rebooted their Classmate from scratch and it still connected fine.
Unfortunately, they did not have an inverter to keep the Classmate powered and instead put it to sleep for the long walk and wait in the queue. When it woke up it no longer recognized FMS.
What interests me most about Andy's report is the attribution to conflicts between the Developer and Driver user accounts. I often had teams running both accounts so some of the sleep problems could be quickly fixed. The only FMS problem with having both accounts open that I knew about was early on when users could accidentally run two copies of the Driver Station software, but you guys prevented that with one of your updates.