I did manage to get this interface working reliably, so I apologize for not posting an update (actually I thought I did). :-)
Anyway, I found that if I toggle the EN bit of the ECSPIx_CONREG after the write completes, then things work ok.
Seems to me that I should not have to do that, but in my case its ok to do. Actually, what I do now is toggle the EN
bit prior to any burst access to the device. Can you tell me if you do that in your code?