I recently had to install a second NIC into my suse box...my first one was faulty. Its exactly the same as my first one (ie...make and model)...new MAC of course.

During boot sometimes the new card is assigned a IP address/submask and sometimes its not. I have broadband but firefox loads my homepage as if I have dial-up and other times it will not load at all. My email client (T-bird) loads just fine and opensuse updater works just like before...fast. I have cleared all data from Firefox but stills it crawls...sometimes it take up to 20 mins to load "any" page if it loads at all.

I entered into my router and released and renewed my DHCP but the address' do not match up...I suspect the MAC listed in the router configuration is for my old card.

I have shutdown my firewall...the firewall lists my new card as eth0 but has a second entry for a "custom string" at eth1...Both interfaces are allowed to the External zone...correct? I have no idea how to remove/delete this entry...the firewall gui does not allow me to delete the eth1 entry...perhaps that is the problem...the eth1. For now, I have disabled the firewall but that still hasnt made a difference in speed. Is there a configuration file that I have to edit?

Minus a complete reinstall of OpenSuSE 11.0...which seems like overkill...what else can I do!!! Thoughts and suggestions extremely wanted!...thanks in advance.

If email & OS updates are fast and reliable, then there's nothing wrong with your network.
Looks like the problem lies with firefox.

Have you tried disabling ipv6 in firefox's about:config and then restarting firefox ?

Have you tried using another browser?

Run 'ifconfig eth1 down' and see if that helps. Any chance you have IPv6 running now? That can cause problems for some configurations. If you are not using it, you can disable it to see if that helps.

Within my firewall there is an option to enable IPv6...it is enable, I will shut that down as well as about:config within Firefox. thanks again

We'd rather know what you did do (and if it worked, or not) than what you propose to do.

Please keep us updated as to the problem is solved / unsolved.