LinuxQuestions.org - help network causes crash. (long post)

Hardware...AMD 1700, 512 DDR, motherboard with onboard sound, graphics, network etc (SiS 740 chipset) connected via a windows 2000 professional system to the net via ADSL.

using slackware-current updating via Swaret mainly.

PROBLEM : my system will randomly hang - need to reboot. There is no single thing that can be linked to this EXCEPT the network. I can leave my machine on for days happily if i am not connected to the network. Once the network is connected a crash is a certainty. Earliest crashes are as soon as the network is detected on boot (before even getting to login prompt) and then the system can crash at any time. This is getting to be very frustrating since if i am updating via swaret or compiling/building large programs etc it is pretty certain that there will be a crash and things will need to be redone and there is the fact that hda1 has to be checked for inconsistencies after each crash.
I have had the machine crash, then reboot to have it crash again whilst logging in, to then have it crash when X starts...and so on sometimes i spend more time waiting for the machine to reboot and check hda1/hda2 etc than i do actually using the damn thing.

This has been going on for a long time and at first it was a small annoyance but recently i have been needing to use the net a lot more and it has become a serious inconvienience and has got to the point where i am seriously considering going back to that other OS cause that worked fine before i put linux on.

I have had Red Hat, Debian and Mandrake on before Slackware and have had the same problem so i am pretty sure it is a hardware problem. But i cannot afford to upgrade my hardware (I have one of those Cube PC's so there is no room for a normal network card), upgrading would mean a new case, motherboard+sound/graphics/network etc and i just cant afford that.

Is there anything i can do to find out what is wrong?

Thanks

phunkymunky