Well, I guess I can start to see why people don't like Netgear. I've never had any problem with them before, but then I've never really used their managed stuff. These "smart" switches are (a) tedious to configure through a pointy-clicky web interface (I've just sat here for ages adding all the vlans on my network, then clicking through every vlan in turn and individually adding each to all the trunk ports, urgh) and (b) stupid, in the sense that they point-blank refuse to have their management address in VLAN 2 even though I've turned off their "voice VLAN" feature and my network has run fine for 15 years with VLAN 2 as the management VLAN. I got these 48-port switches cheap and cheerful off ebay (£15 each, I think it was) and didn't think there was any way they could fail to be okay for standard RSTP, a bunch of VLANs, access ports and trunk ports, and pretty much no other requirements. Oh well. Nearly done setting up a fresh VLAN with a fresh set of firewalling specially for managing these stupid switches.