Phewww!!!  it was DNS..   I had them pointing to my local internal DNS server VM  which was hung -- I added 8.8.8.8 and viola -- back in business.

thanks for helping through the panic!

My batch 4 order still unshipped, lets hope tomorrow.... 

2014-07-24 17:49:37.0

Air bubble can enter in between. So never ever try that. Clean it and apply a "proper" thermal grease.
Just put a medium pea size on all the ASICs and place the heatsink, screw it up.
Spreading if not done properly will invite bubble in between the heatsink and thermal paste layer and hinter effective heat transmission.
Also, never use a thermal pad in S3 since the heatsink is a lengthy one touching ASICs here and there, possibility of a bad contact is higher.
Stabilisation depends on the quality, type and brand of the thermal grease.
Bitmaintech's engineer advised me to use "Dow Coining Thermal Paste Grease" or one which have conductivity above 3.

Have you done the firmware update?
Whether you re-applied thermal paste?
How long it passed with the said hash rate?

If I have to resort to reseating the S3's heat sink, I'd probably use Arctic Silver 5 since I already have a couple of tubes of it to avoid additional expense.  I figured that if it's good enough for a CPU, it should be good enough for the BM1382.  Hopefully, it would work out.

So I got brave today. I have 2 S3s on 2 corsair 500W PSUs. I also have a S1 on a 600W modular corsair.

I clocked both S3s to 250mhz and left for 5 hours. Keep in mind I was only using 1 cable per blade or 2 cables per S3.

I got interesting results. One of them liked it and hashed around 500GH/s. The other dropped to around 360GH/s.

So I decided to keep the good one at 250mhz and brought the other one back to stock 218.75mhz.

I checked the watts at the wall on the OC unit and it pulls 453 watts while stock they pull 378 watts.

I'm at 250mzh with only 2 cables, which should be fine since the S1 pulls 410 watts stock with 2 cables and I had it pulling as much as 520 watts OCed and over-volted.

I thought it would be a good idea to put the OCed S3 on the 600 watt PSU, but when I did the cables got very warm, while when the unit was on the 500 watt PSU the cables were barely warm. All of the PSUs are bronze but, the CX has better cables then the CM I guess. I'm putting it back on the 500 watt. Hopefully 90% of the power rating will be okay.

I still have some other frequencies I can try with the other unit. I'll report back if I get anything above 440GH/s.

Thanks to everyone who responded. BTW, Arctic Silver 5 has thermal conductivity of ~8.5W/m-K

@aztecminer
Yes, Arctic Silver 5 manual says that you can start using immediately, but it will decrease the temperatures slowly (break-in over 200hr)
I am running 2.5 hours so far after AS5 application and temperature dropped from the initial 43 to 40-41C already.
I will wait to report the speed comparison until 12-14 h mark if not later.

@allcoinminer
Got it re plopping the heat sink back without cleaning and reapplication. However, I did spread it evenly over the surface, but took care not to have any on pins/connectors (because it is slightly capacitive according to manual).
I will post pictures later to explain why I decided to spread it (hint-what you described did not work for Bitmain).

@klondike_bar
thanks for the info regarding possible air bubble if no re-application of paste.
decided not to let it cure-too impatient, but started with lower mhz.

If you don't have AS5, and can't wait for amazon, grab it (3.5g) at Microcenter-they usually have loads. I ordered some online, but could not wait  

That is the worst UPS tracking history I have ever seen.  So sorry!

Says the guy who quoted the original post verbatim.