Thanks, pepperoni7 & tv84,
Unfortunately, reverting back to 7.31 did not resolve the issue.
Poking around in the telnet console, I discovered the crash address 0x4027236C belongs to a module called 'nspm.dll' (related to DNS/WINS namespace provider?)
Inspecting the DLL, it seems to crash after reading the registry 'Ident\Name', hinting something to do with the system name (not exactly sure what is really doing, it was a wild guess).
So I changed the system name from 'msox3104t' to 'mso' and the Web Interface now works (no idea why that worked but it did).
In hindsight, I recently configured DHCP to issue that system name and also updated the FW 7.40 at the same time but did not correlate the new name to the issue.
Everything works now even on the latest 7.40 FW
Thanks again for the help!