Success on two fronts! The systems people discovered that the problem was due to a change in the firewall code. Something to do with deep packet inspection and differing buffer sizes.

I had already gotten far enough along with the Sys::SigAction testing to find that it does work. I was about to post some code but it is practically verbatim to the examples in the link included in my first post above. I'm going to implement Sys:SigAction in my programs from now on to prevent the occurrence of perpetual hangs.