Media Player Hell [Slim]

I've moved from the stix into town, and find there's now five wifi lans in my street. Not ideal, so decided to invest into some powerline ethernet adapters. Here's where my hell started. Powerline worked right off the bat, and tested out at 80mbps, great stuff given they're the cheaper ones that are rated 85. Laptop works off it, streams movies a treat, file copies are super fast, xbox 360 works fine off it, live seems ace, downloads work, bosh. Plug the chipped xbox in, stutter hell. Gah. So no worries, the xbox goes back on wifi, and works. Then I remember my wifi lans only on wep because I was using my DS on it, and wasn't really that arsed about wifi security when I lived in a field. So I enable WPA on my wifi, change the bridge to the xbox1 to wpa, now that's in stuttering hell too. So my xbmc basically doesn't work any more. Feh.So I try the 360 as a media player. Jesus, how hard is that? First effort involves connecting it to Media Player 11, except that doesn't work if you have a domain, as I do at home. So, I install ORB, a upnp streaming thing. That works very well for mp3 and images, no complaints at all. But it transcodes xvids, so they look shite. Fuck that.The next step is to fuck it all and go for native wmv 360 encodes, but orb and it wont play windows media at all, fuck knows why, just dosn't. Jesus. So apparently I can plug in an external hdd to play shit via usb 2. Cor, didn't know that, so I try copying a 9gb hd wmv movie to my external hdd. It farts, you can't do that, it's FAT32 and the limits 4gb. Fuck me! So I convert to NTFS, copy the file, sorted. Plug it into the 360, naff all. I read up some more, the 360 doesn't do NTFS. What the fuck? It's microsoft for fucks sake! What I can do, apparently, not tried this yet out of principle, is format it HFS+, and that works with large files AND the 360, fuck knows why.So, I'm fucked, I've fucked me beloved chipped xbox somehow and I've got no replacement. Wank.(ps, anyone got the default cache settings for xbmc, I'm wondering if I've dicked that up?)