Andy;
On Tue, 2014-10-28 at 11:30 +0000, Andy Brittain wrote:
My conflict was driven by problems with the onboard NIC and OpenVPN. Having rebuilt everything and disabling the onboard NIC everything worked fine until I installed OpenVPN at which point I started to get reboot hangs.
That's almost like saying the following: "I blew a tire in my car, so I shifted the weight so that the rim doesn't touch the road." While you may be fortunate and have a smooth road to drive on, sooner or later you're going to hit a bump on the other side and that rim will touch... aka: your pc may lock. You may wish to verify proper driver for your internal NIC is correct and current.
Keep in mind this: one big difference between windows and linux is that windows does hardware read/writes via bios, Linux does them direct to the devices themselves. As I test, I've taken CDRW units that began to fail under NERO and other cd burning softwares on windows and then used the same physical device under linux, which always created the CD.
Hopefully for you, the system will become more stable for you now.