[Resending as the last copy seems to have been lost in the ether -- it certainly isn't in the GMANE archive]
Well, behavior with the patch applied is certainly different. The large download I'm running still times out; however, it is now able to resume without needing to bring the interface down and back up. However, after the first timeout, subsequent timeouts occur with much greater frequency -- making this multi-GB download still an impracticality when using -net tap. The flood ping is not killing the network connection, though it is interrupted by frequent messages: "Warning: time of day goes back (-23150us), taking countermeasures". (This is no the high end of the time variances shown; the smallest are on the scale of 120us). [btw -- Wind River? heh -- 'yall were The Great Enemy back when I was at MontaVista around 2000-2002 or so]