It could be that it is as simple as that, time will only tell. That is only the result of one night of observations on a system that has shown the problem in the past. The reason I tried this, before working on the card, was that I am pretty sure that initially I didn't have the conductor plugged in the network during the first few days of the show, and that I had not seen it failed before running a show with the connection ON. When I observed it for the first time, as well as every time after that, the etd/conductor was connected to the network.
With random bugs like this one, there might be more than one source, and even if being connected to the network while a show is playing, is one of them (which it might not), other parts of the system might be aggravating it.
Nevertheless, I am happy that the show went without problems last night, and I will keep the system as is for the next few shows, while keeping a close eye on it.