It seems I've misinterpreted the debug output.
>From the log in the previous message, lines such as this
90 try_time=1270845539, retries=0
indicate the number of retries thus far, not the maximum retries.
Through some debugging, max_retries *IS* in fact being set properly to
net:max-retries when leaving NetAccess::Init via the Reconfig(0) call.
Looking again in the log, you can see that retries is always
"retries=0", never anything higher. Given that net:max-retries=1 and
therefore max_retries=1, we never exceed the limit.
So the question then is, why is retries not being incremented?
