I am using 17 of these boards for my course now - have not had any problems with the boards themselves - just the CodeWarrior debugger.
It sounds to me like a serial comm problem on the cable or PC - especially if it's happening on both the POD and target MCU (different MCUs, XTALS, RS232, and connectors) D-Bug12 use XON/XOFF flow control but I don't think that matters unless you're programming EEPROM of Flash. I'd strongly recommend TeraTerm over HyperTerm.