2538 has non volatile memory as well as volatile one. For the later, its contents are lost in case of the ‘stick’ losing power. Because of that, it should contain only the program stack and variables that do not need saving.
My guess is that they did some firmware adjustments that moved something critical in the volatile memory so some very important settings are lost when losing power.
The solution would be to use a firmware that does not have those changes (it won’t be able to deal with so many devices, though).