[furii]

I'm at a loss to explain the issues you're experiencing. If you have the 'wait for network to start Kodi' option selected, and your wired connection wasn't working properly, then I can see it taking up to 90s to boot, but not 5 minutes. But there's also nothing in the updated firmware which would affect your ethernet connection, regardless if you're using the default MAC address or one extracted from the original firmware. If you want to rule that out, the easiest way is to boot any Linux live USB and re-run the EZ setup script, and it should give you the option to load the MAC from the stock backup on USB when updating the firmware.

My Panny GT50 has no issues displaying the BIOS boot screen so I doubt that's your issue.

If updating your firmware with the MAC from the stock firmware doesn't fix the issue, I'd backup your existing config (via the OE add-on) and do a fresh install of OE (or a hard reset) to rule out a software/config issue.

must have been gremlins...

the bios screen did indeed come up properly for me but only after the 5+ minute wait time. created an ubuntu live stick and ran the ez script from that reinserting the mac address and all seems to be well. wired ethernet was also not working within ubuntu for what it's worth. really quite strange but back to normal.

cheers.