I probably should have updated sooner -- I did write a test page app to
torture the peer connection and I could not reproduce with host-only
networking.

for development, I run a server inside a vm on a macbook connected to the
lan via wifi.  I believe that much of the problem was packet loss due to vm
issues (parallels) and wireless router issues.  power cycling the wifi
router fixed some of it, and running a server on the internet makes the
problem disappear almost entirely.

I still do see occasional issues, and my conclusion is that problems are
due to packet loss.  

I have yet to turn on chrome logging so I don't know what it would show me
-- I remember a post about how to do it a while back.