@Water_my_lawn: I apologize for not being able to stay up to date with this issue. Long story short, I’ve been dealing with with severe health issues and haven’t been able to work on the firmware. I’ve got a bit more energy now to come back and look at this issue. Based on what you described, it sounds like UIPEthernet has fixed the issue for you — does the current version of UIPEthernet (2.0.12) work as is, or did you need to fix some code to make it work for you? I’ve been reading the github issues thread but I am confused whether the fix that made it work for you is in the current UIPEthernet branch or has it been reverted.
In other news, a little while back I’ve made the first version of the firmware that uses lwip which is available in the ESP8266 core 3.0.2. We’ve been testing it and it seems relatively reliable. While this will probably solve the hanging issues for wired Ethernet on OpenSprinkler 3.x, it’s only for ESP8266-based OpenSprinklers, so for OpenSprinkler 2.3 we still need to use either UIPEthernet or EthernetENC.
In any case, let me know what has worked for you and we can obviously make a version of the firmware based on that for any user who is seeing the same problem.