I recently discovered that putting my Kobo pretty much next to the wifi router seems to resolve the "stuck endlessly on 'Checking for Updates' and draining the battery" issue I've been having recently.
I'm in an apartment building, so there's a lot of stuff bouncing around on the 2.4 ghz band (thankfully the neighbour with the
faulty microwave oven has moved away...). So interference makes sense.
But... does the Kobo firmware just not timeout the connection after some time?