Just an update to this, I had waited to work around this error until I was less distracted at work. Anyhow, I figured I had an easy way of knowing if it was emplode or the empeg that caused the problem. I restarted the empeg, tried the sync again, and recieved the same error, instead of recieving a cookie error of any type.
And just for extra details, the system that this and the other error occured on is a Windows XP Pro machine, running 2 ethernet connections to two different networks. The empeg sits on the network that the laptop sees as number two, and both the empeg and laptop had an IP address in the same subnet of 255.255.255.0. The network has about 100-150 machines up at a time, and has two switches, one that the empeg is connected into with my laptop at my desk (thus elliminating the possibility of normal traffic being seen by the empeg). The empeg does get quite a few broadcast packets though, as it's a test network with a ton of SNMP discoveries going on, along with the typical broadcast traffic of practicially any Intel based server OS.
Looking at the errors, I believe it's some sort of network glitch in emplode it's self, due to the fact that the subnet remains accessable even after emplode dies, and a restart of only emplode fixes the problem.