I want to submit this as a bug, but before I do I thought I'd check to see if there is a hotkey to disable the drop-on-wire behavior in the network editor. It seems this gets disabled on me on an almost weekly basis, but I have no idea what I could be doing that would turn this off mid-session.

hey! .. ‘e’ in network view

excellent!

now if only I could figure out where all these hotkeys are listed… :?

Check the hotkey editor. It's actually arranged quite nicely in my opinion.