Senseless:  Sorry for your troubles and these neophyte questions, trying to understand... you are recommending using the ethernet port, but not the wifi?

You suggest that perhaps the TPLink adapter drawing enough power to run both ethernet and wifi, concurrently, might have damaged the chip?

To use ethernet port, is there anything involved besides setting a static IP, other than 192.168.0.100; so you know how to access the web interface?