LinuxQuestions.org - Fedora 15 Slow Wired Ethernet Connection To Internet

I've got 7 machines on my home network using a cable modem. 4 of those machines are running various flavors of Red Hat based Linux (CentOS; Fedora 14 i686; Fedora 15 x86_64). The problem is the machine that is now running Fedora 15 x86_64. I want to use Fedora 15 or Fedora 16 to take advantage of the KVM virtualization so I can get rid of the obsolete VMware Server 2 I'm running on my CentOS 5 machine.

Up until 3-days ago this machine was running Fedora 13 x86_64 perfectly. It has 3 NICs (2 embedded and 1 expansion). The embedded NICs are 1 gig and the expansion is 100. The base speed of my network (including router and switches) is 100. Their names were eth0, eth1, eth2 and I had several alias' defined (eth0:0 & eth1:0). This allowed specific applications to have their own server names (i.e.: myjboss = 192.168.1.14 & myoracle = 192.168.1.11; etc.). And since I have 3 wires going to 2 separate switches I could keep my NAS traffic separate from the normal network traffic.

I attempted to do a upgrade and I followed the rules (or so I thought). Upgrade 13 to 14; then upgrade 14 to 15. The 13 to 14 worked well I thought, but the 14 to 15 would not go because of many, many duplicate packages. So I went to the Fedora forum and was told that the only reliable upgrade was to do a fresh install. So I did a install to Fedora 15 (thinking that when it was time to move to Fedora 16 I would do a upgrade since the 13 to 14 worked...).

My problem is this:
On the initial install the network connection to the internet was so slow I could not read my mail. I entered the ifconfig and it displayed the NIC names as p5p1; p6p1; p33p1. So I read up on several things (including the How To Forge document The Perfect Server - Fedora 15 x86_64 - ISPConfig 2) and I saw the use of the 'biosdevname' parameter. Add this parameter to the grub.conf file as biosdevname=0 and this is supposed to make it use the old naming convention - not so and still very slow. I then read somewhere that the best place to do this was in /etc/udev/rules.d and to modify the 70-persistent-net.rules parameter. Well there wasn't one, so I created one. I rebooted and once again there was no eth0, eth1, or eth2 listed in the ifconfig display. However, there was a em1; em2; and p33p1 listed and the network connection seemed to work as it did under Fedora 13. So I edited the 70...rules config changing the names I know from the past. After the reboot, it was slow once again.
Question 1: Is it possible to get the old names and speed at the same time?
Question 2: Why did they change it in the first place?
Question 3: I normally use a text boot and the network program as opposed to using NetworkManager program. How can I go back to this?
Question 4: If I have to go back to the em1, and em2; where are these definitions located and can I edit and use em1:0 and em2:0?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!
Gene