Is it possible to alter the placement of Wii Channels

My guess is the cable itself or the contact positions. Try moving the jacks and bending the cable slightly to see if you can spot anything suspicious which might even reproduce the case.

This question appears to be more suited for SuperUser actually, be it gaming related or not, it is basically a technical issue.

There is no official way to apply updates to a Wii apart from connecting it to the Internet.

Wii games are never patched: Nintendo has a strict no-patch policy, with the idea that a game shouldn't ever need patches after release to be feature-complete or free of major bugs. The result of this is threefold:

• You don't need to connect it to the internet to play games that don't have DLC features
• Games that are obviously unplayable at release just don't happen
• The rare major bug that does slip through QA is a big embarrassment for Nintento and the publisher

The Wii does need a network connection for some non-essential features. These include:

• Game DLC, leaderboards, and multiplayer
• Wii messaging, polls, news, weather, Mii Parade, and other non-game system features
• Buying and downloading Virtual Console games

The one essential thing the Wii needs the network for is when a newly-released game requires a particular system version in order to run. The first game I noticed this with was Rock Band: Beatles, which wouldn't run until I updated to (if I recall correctly) system menu 4.3. With a newly-purchased Wii you won't run into this for some time, but when you eventually do it will be a show-stopper if the Wii doesn't have network access.

Even for system updates and features that do require a network connection, a constant connection is not required. Once the data is on the Wii or the update applied, you can disconnect the Wii from the network and use the Wii normally.