OK, I've been trying it for a few days now, and it's definitely working fine now without trying to use the local network setting - so I'm confident that that was simply a business-as-usual Connection Manager glitch connected with the fact that I was using it at one point while the device was cradled and I was getting screen shots of the configuration screen.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that if you're interested, contact me and I'll send you the latest version to try.
About the new-look MSDN Subscriber Downloads area: am I the only person who really, really hates that incredibly slow, unresponsive treeview?
In other news: I've been testing my RSS generation code with both RSS Bandit and SharpReader lately. Once I've got my site up I'll be using it to provide notifications of software updates (as mentioned previously).