Hi faceplant,
To solve the issue about continuous rebooting when the WiFi is unreachable you have to modify the dhcpclient.conf:
$ vi /etc/dhcp/dhcpclient.conf
change the lines after "#require subnet-mask, domain-name-servers;" to:
timeout 20;
retry 10;
reboot 0;
select-timeout 0;
Save and exit, at the next reboot the dhcpclient will try to get an IP, if the WiFi network is not in range it will continue booting after it fails to acquire an IP address.
Note: the fix above solve the issue experienced by faceplant which can be reproduced if you enable wlan0 on boot (auto wlan0) and your WiFi network is not in range.