Hi Henning
Just a couple of little comments.
"Made a thread a while back regarding the same issue. Haven't seen any response from HP whatsoever"
These forums are a peer resource HP offers to customers. You may our people occassionally answering questions, but these answers won't cause any action from HP per se. We're not answering in official way here, but on our own time. To have issues reported to technical support you will need to contact support and open a troubleshooting case, either via telephone or through My Networking portal.
"Looks like the partially fixed it in 5.5.2.1, behavior changed but still stalls occasionally. and it seems permanently fixed in build 5.5.2.14-01-10104"
The warranty says that you're eligible to have maintenance releases for your device for one year after purchase, after that a Care Pack is required. For upgrades a Care Pack is required from day 1. That means that if your device is currently running 5.4 -branch, you can't have a SW upgrade to 5.5 -branch even if you find a fix for your issue there. That will require purchasing a SW Care Pack.
There's also another point. The fact that for example 5.4 Release Notes do not contain a fix but 5.5 RN has it doesn't mean that the issue isn't fixed on 5.4. The SW branches are separately developed - it may be that the issue isn't even present on the 5.4. It is also possible that similar behavior is present, but it's caused by a different trigger. In that case it would have a different bug number.