Made a self-inflicted mistake. The Ethernet in my NUC stopped working. I am not sure how, but the Intel driver was no longer being used, and the in-box Windows driver took over. Needless to say, this causes the Ethernet to show as disconnected and no longer work. Downloaded the latest driver and I was back in business.
Here's the mistake -- while I was on the download page, I noticed that the graphics driver & BIOS were nearly 1 year out of date as well. I updated those. Now, Media Center frequently stops playing video with errors such as "video error corrupt or missing file" and similar messages that point to the graphics subsystem. This happens even for remote extender clients. I have managed on one occasion to find an executable with the name igfx*.exe using 100% of one CPU. Killing that and restarting the video allowed things to work successfully from there out.
For kicks, I rolled back the video driver only -- problem still happens. So, I'm guessing maybe a lower level issue with the latest BIOS which I know has a firmware update for the graphics subsystem?
For software, I'm thinking of rolling the whole system back to the way it was a few weeks ago. But is there a way to roll back to an older BIOS? Or is anyone interested in helping me track down the problem? I should be able to grab dumps when the problem happens.
-Scott