OK... Thanks for reply'ing.

Yes, PMDX is a consideration for USB products and BOBs, etc. Steve Stallings and PMDX do make the best BOB I've ever seen and used. I highly recommend their PMDX-126 board.

The PMDX USB product is doing well for many and in talking to Steve it's too much of a gamble that USB will maintain connectivity in an industrial environment, it's just fine for 3D printers though. I've been through this myself in the past and the Mach Forum is packed with users having connection/pipe/handshake issues going well beyond what a ferrite bead can fix.

Keeping in mind the USB standard (as per USB-IF at usb.org) is not suitable for communications in harsh or industrial environments.
A glaring example is the non-locking connector implemented in USB cabling.

Separately, PMDX has repeatably promised an ethernet Smart-BOB controller and after waiting for it for 2 years "it ain't gonna happen."  

Kind Regards and thanks again for helping out!
 - Haik

PS- there's a good chance I'll get the HiCON. Indications are that Vital Systems has high regard for standards and best practices. In engineering these things are much more than corporate-speak.

To other folks that might read this...

The Warp9  ESS is cruel joke wherever a rotating tool is involved, hardware product possibilities quickly vaporize as the firmware and plugin development fail egregiously. An example is rotating the toolpath in the M3 toolpath display while running a (gCode) program crashes the plugin almost every time.
Last year while resuming M3 from an ESS crash their plugin sent corrupt buffer data resulting in a runaway Z axis... driving my HSD Spindle into my 4th axis costing me over $5000 in spindle replacement. I'm lucky I wasn't injured.

I hope others read this and understand that just losing time dealing with home-brew motion control is only the lighter side of the costs. Tool, stock and machine damage constitute another realm of loses. Worst loses are safety and health.

Be careful, don't blame what might be a PC issue on ESS.  That tool path will consume lots of CPU when rotating it in Mach3 and cut the flow of data off to the ESS.  It depends a lot on the CPU and graphics card.  I can cause the same issue when running Mach 3 on my Matsuura mill with a Galil (it has an Atom CPU).  Mach 4 runs the tool path differently and it is much more efficient.  Not an issue even on the Atom board.  

From what you have described, Mach 4 will take care of most of your issues.  I also have a machine with ESS and Mach4 and it flies.  No problems at all.  It just runs and runs.  I have a HiCON too and I like it.  IMHO, ESS and HiCON are both good devices.  They do about the same thing, which is run steppers or position controlled servo drives.

Steve