Video output frozen, including menu backgrounds

OK, here’s another weird one. My Premiere updated (downgraded?) last night from 14.8 to 14.8.U2. I’m OTA only, SDUI only, and I never had any problems with 14.8. I’ve used YouTube a bit, but never NetFlix, Hulu, etc. I use only the regular remote. My network (DSL) was disconnected for a while yesterday afternoon so that TiVo missed one service connection and at least one VCM connection, but I doubt that that is relevant.

This morning I had no video output except menus, or maybe I should say the video output was hung or frozen. I could walk through menus and do whatever I wanted (and see the menu text), but the background was always a still frame from “Nixon in China” which was on from 2:00 am to 5:00 am. I should also mention that the PBS station showing that was experiencing some glitchiness, apparently from flaky hardware, but that has happened before without hanging (in any sense) my Premiere or my TiVo HD.

As a test I initiated recordings of Sesame Street on that station and another PBS station. I still couldn’t see video of those recordings or old recordings or live TV, only the still frame from “Nixon in China”. No progress bar showed, and when I used the back arrow to exit playback, I was asked whether I wanted to delete or save the recording, as if the recording was near the end.

Finally I gave up and restarted the Premiere. (I think the Premiere took longer to restart than the HD even before 14.8, but now it takes about 8 minutes, a couple of minutes longer than the HD I think.) After the restart, everything was back to normal, including all old recordings and even both recordings of Sesame Street, so recording had been unaffected. It appears that whatever code generates video output for TiVo to send to HDMI had hung somehow. The TiVo HD was not affected by whatever triggered this.