Me personally, I do not have connector software installed on any of my pc's, I RDP into server and launch dashboard from there. One less resource my computers need to use. I have full fuctionality of shared folders, backups, etc, without the connector.
One problem with RDP'ing to the server and using the Dashboard there is that you cannot access any backed-up data. To mount any of the backed-up drives you have to use Dashboard from a client.
I don't know if the original poster's problem is same as mine, but without being able to run Dashboard from a client even (as in my case) when WHS 2011 is successfully backing up the clients makes those backup mostly useless, since in >90% of cases
where I needed to recover from backups involved file(s) rather than bare metal/full restores.
Dashboard not being reliable is simply unacceptable since when you need to restore file(s) from a backup you usually won't have the luxury to spend hours trying to troubleshoot Dashboard problems.