I was off to go shoot some bots to improve my light weapons rating (how do you improve the "combat piloting" rating, by the way? It doesn't seem to be affected by bot kills) when I got caught in an ion storm in AC-M11. As usual, I made a beeling straight for the exit point, but then I noticed the telltale purple blips on my radar that indicate free-floating cargo, and thought I might as well pick them up while I'm here, since they weren't too far off the path to the exit point. I grabbed the cargo, went to the exit point, hit the activate key, and then... nothing. I was still stuck in the ion storm, and the pirate collectors were rapidely bearing down on me.

I tried again. Still nothing. By that time the pirates were too close to ignore, so I flew away from the exit point to engage them. Once I'd reduced them to so many pieces of space dust, I turned back to the exit point. I was out of range at that point, so I flew over there again, hit the activate button, and suddenly found myself right where I was before I'd hit the button, still stuck at the exit point with the ion storm showing no signs of abating.

I figured that I might have to fly away from the exit point a bit to "reset" it so that it would detect my presence next time, so I flew out to more than 3000 metres and back again. Still nothing.

Then I got blown up by pirates.

It could be the lag we are currently experiencing.
Did you have a jump destination set? (That was not the location you were at?) You CAN jump straight into a storm. Going to the exit point will only help you if you have a destination set.
Though this sounds like the lag problem. Which is probably why the cargo was there. You found the remains of someone else who got caught in the same storm. :D

PS: You improve the 'Combat' rating by taking combat missions and getting the bonuses.

I have seen the same thing twice. I at first thought it was lag but if that's the case, wow, what lag. MInutes, lots of minutes. I did find that you can change your destination in the nav map to a different sector and then warp out... But I think this is a bug from the storm area.
Sparksvonrou

It looks like the problem was that the ion storm sector was my destination sector, so once I arrived there I no longer had a nav point set.

There should be some sort of message when you try to make a sector jump without a nav point set, since it's a fairly easy mistake to make.

I've already experiment this behaviour 3rd times after vendetta auto-upgrade. I hope this has a rapid solution or the site will receive a hundred of bug reports !