[Q] adb hangs during push of large files

My HTC Incredible has 8GiB of internal storage. When I mount it to /emmc and try to push a large (>100MiB or so) file, the push will hang partway through -- no response, only Ctrl+C kills it. I know it has hung because I could check the status of the file via a separate 'adb shell', but the shell also starts returning nothing.

The weird thing is, if I push the large file in recovery mode, it always works completely fine.

If anyone has any suggestions, they'd be much appreciated.