I have managed to run in excess of 30 manual zones since installing the W5500 and it hasn’t crashed yet. With the original ethernet module it would have had a pretty high likelihood of crashing at least once by now, but until I’ve run for a few more days without lockups I’m not quite ready to say that the new module has fixed the problem, because once in a while the original module would make it a few days without locking up.
Most of the prior lockups resulted in the on-screen clock freezing and the buttons being unresponsive. It would usually still respond to pings, but any zone I had manually started would still be running if the lockup occurred while the zone was on. I think this may be similar to what John was seeing too.
What Bena describes above actually (mostly) reflects what I was seeing while I was using the WiFi interface for the last week or so. The majority of the times I tried to connect to the controller (using either the iOS app or the web interface) it would time out. It would often take upwards of 15 – 20 minutes of trying before I could get connected. What was different from what Bena reported is that pings would also time out. The controller’s on-screen display reported a strong WiFi signal, and it apparently had no trouble syncing NTP. Several times when I was unable to connect I would run a continuous ping (once every 2 seconds) from my iMac, and after some number (usually 150 – 300) of timed out pings it would start responding quite reliably to the pings and at that point I was able to connect from the app or browser right away. I never had the controller crash while on WiFi, but it was devilishly difficult to connect to it most of the times I tried. Several times I tried cycling power when I was unable to connect, and it would reboot without errors and sync the time, but that didn’t seem to help me get connected.