The problem where the player does not properly reboot itself during the synch is a known bug and will be fixed in the next release.

Regarding the "it won't synch when I'm using hijack" problem (which is a separate problem I believe)... Are you using ethernet or USB?

If you are using ethernet, is there a chance that you've got the Nimda or Code Red viruses running on your machine/network by any chance? Those hammer web-enabled ethernet devices pretty hard and might be responsible for killing an ethernet synch. You see, one of Hijack's features is to web-enable the car player. If Nimda or Code Red were present, a synch without hijack might behave normally, while a synch with hijack might be overwhelmed by port-80-requests.

This is just a wild guess. But I can't think of any other reason that adding Hijack would result in a synch failure.