sporadic network problems on direct connection
 

I set up a network directly between my windows XP box and my Suse Linux box a couple weeks ago (XP box to router, and XP to Suse via crossover cable).
Then i set up VNC so I can connect to my linux box from the windows box. today the internet connection from Suse is flaky at best. I can't bring up a google page in Konqueror but I can sometimes get other web sites to show up

I can ping the XP box from my windows box with no packet loss. I can also ping my gateway and www.google.com with no packet loss.

I'm stumped on how to troubleshoot this since it's working sometimes.

Any ideas?