Well - it may be early days, but after the reboot without that realtek plugin. I had clean logs after a few hours, so in attempt to 'break' the system, I started a parity check. 6 hours later, still cleans logs, so I started up all my containers, and even the cpu killing tdarr with an extra CPU thread configured in tdarr to try and stress out the CPU's to breaking point. They have never seen this amount of activity before - and so far - clean logs, no lockups, no reboots :
If I wake up to a healthy system, with a good parity check and no crashes/reboots, and a clean log, then I will be really pissed as there were no 'hardware issues' at all - with me having close to $500 of equipment sitting here that will be not needed. And all seemingly related to this realtek driver!