What a nightmare. Nothing worse than successfully bench testing something and have it not work once on the layout. Especially if you have to crawl under the layout to troubleshoot.Do you think static damaged the one board while you were "handling" it?
I'm surprised by the phone plug issues. These used to be pretty durable (can't tell you how many times I've yanked a phone plug out of the wall socket by accident. Just plugged it back in and all was good). I wonder if its a wire gauge/quality issue.