Okay, so it still happened. Chain of events:

-put empeg in... 30 seconds later it's in standby.
-check hijack screen blanker settings... nope, all off
-reseat it... a few seconds later it's back in standby
-press the top button, plays for a few minutes... standby
-remove steering wheel remote to rule that out, but it goes back into standby
-i tried to get to the emphatic menu, but it jumped to FM before i could get there
-reseat and try again to get to emphatic through hijack menu. Get there, then press the knob to bring the menu up so i could quit it... but it freaks out and the screen goes blank... then into standby.
-reseat again, get to emphatic, quit it, then the player works for a good 10 minutes.
-thinking that fixed it i reseated it again to test if i would have to turn emphatic off again to get it to stop this annoying behavior....

but it never went in standby again after i quit emphatic that one time. Even after rebooting it multiple times and having emphatic load.

I'm running it in the dock here at work to see if it comes back... but it appears to have stopped. Anyone have any theories on this one? I'd like to know wtf was going on.