Apple TV2 made useless after last update

Question

I want to start by saying I love my Apple TV, or at least I did when it was working. The problem is since the most recent update, I've lost the ability to connect to my network at all making the Apple TV nothing more than an expensive paperweight. Regardless of whether or not I have the Ethernet cable plugged in, the Apple TV thinks it's plugged in. It's not able to resolve an IP address through the wired connection and since it is also unable to engage the wireless radio, I can't connect that way either. I initially though it was the result of a bad setting somewhere so I reset everything but there was no change. I then thought maybe I had a corrupted update so I decided to restore it. Since I can't connect to the Internet, I couldn't restore it on its own so I had to plug in a micro USB cable from my camera and use iTunes. That's a bad design, but irrelevant to my situation. After restoring, I have the same issue. At this point I don't know what to do. I know it's not my router since all of my other devices are connecting just fine and I know my Apple TV was working a few weeks ago when I last used it. The only thing that's changed is the software update. I know I'm not the only person with this problem since a bit of Googling has resulted in others with the exact same symptoms but as of yet, I haven't found anyone able to fix it.
Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

I checked the socket and it appeared to be fine. No obvious obstructions or anything. I also tried assigning it a fixed IP address with no change. Since it didn't seem to be able to set its network time I decided to see if I could set it manually. Unfortunately I could only set the timezone so I turned off the automatic setting there and set it to the correct timezone. After a restart nothing had changed so I decided to set the timezone back to automatic. Instead of defaulting to Cupertino it stayed with Washington, DC which was what I'd set it to previously so I thought this was promising. After another restart, it made it past the setting network time screen but it reported that it was unsuccessful. At least it made it past this screen on it's own instead of me pressing the menu key to cancel it. So, I decided to check the network settings again and this time I was shocked to see wifi as an option! Technically, the Ethernet cable was still plugged in but it was at least showing that the wireless radio was 'on' for a change. This gave me hope so I attempted to connect wirelessly to my network and it worked! After all this time, it looks like the timezone setting is what it was getting stuck on.