Everything hangs on live CD and normal boot

Hi forum. I’m trying out Manjaro for the first time on a Thinkpad Carbon X1 (after running Arch successfully for a year or so on a desktop).

Both the latest XFCE and Gnome distributions are resulting in random hangs in virtually all applications: sudo, network manager, curl, everything. Network connectivity very intermittent to nil. System completely unusable in all cases, whether booting from live USB or installed HDD. Here is a typical snippet from journalctl -k:

INFO: task sudo:1831 blocked for more than 122 seconds
Not tainted 5.10.23-1-MANJARO #1
...
Call Trace:
__schedule+0x295/0x810
schedule+0x5b/0xc0
schedule_prompt_disabled+0x11/0x20
...
rtnetlink_rcv_msg+0x287/0x390

I’ve run Ubuntu on this laptop successfully before but never Arch or Manjaro. Anybody have a clue?