Or to clarify a bit:
Why do I have to "service network restart" every time samba, atalk, named, or a variety of other services have an error?
For example, when looking in the messages log, I find a message from named saying "lame server responding", or a message from samba saying "network read error".

Now, while I would like to simply avoid all these errors, I don't think that is possible.

What I would like is to be able to prevent these errors from taking down the network!
How can I prevent these services from ruining my linux experience.

Oh, and this is pretty time sensitive. If I can't get this fixed soon, the machine gets switched over to windows 2000. Linux may be great in some respects, but it seems that unless you have a lot of experience, it's not possible to run a stable system.