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Issues 1-4 have pretty much only one available solution - try using a different USB stick. The uboot in general and the (rather ancient) version shipped on iConnect in particular are known to be rather picky about what USB devices they like.
As far as problems with ssh/eth0, you have several options. Firstly, you may want to check that this is really the problem you're having. Take out the USB stick with Arch installation and take a look at the /var/log/messages file there (if you don't have a Linux box to mount it on, you'll need to either install some Linux distro in a VM or install an ext2 driver on your machine). If you see it complaining about something related to eth0, this is very likely the problem you're experiencing.
First, most of eth0 problems seem to happen when using 100Mb/s switches - if that's what you use and you have a GigE switch lying around, try using it instead. Some people reported that trying a different cable also helped even though the original cable worked perfectly fine with the Iomega stock kernel.
Second, if you only need the wired connection to set up wireless, you may try to set it up by manually editing config files instead. See this post for some ideas; just make sure to add "-B" option to the wpa_supplicant line you add to your rc.local if you don't want to spend half a day figuring out why your serial console no longer works
The final and, possibly, the best option is to set the arcNumber to 2870, which will make Arch kernel perform the exact same initialization of eth0 as Iomega stock kernel.