I was having trouble getting my internet to work and I finally have got it working but now when i boot up my linux box it freezes on the portmon startup...what is portmon and how can i fix it?

To get it booted, press I (the key) when it says something like 'press I to enter interactive boot' (it's fairly early in the process - have your finger on the key). It will then ask you if you want to start this and that. Say no to Portmon and you should be fine.

Once you've booted, go to mandrake control center-> system -> drakxservices and disable portmon from starting at bootup - I am not sure what it is but drakxservices should give you a brief description of what it is. There probably are a few other things you do not need to start at boot.

I have ADSL connection to the Internet, and for a while I was having a b-i-g slowdown during boot time (not a complete freeze, though) when the portmon stuff was being processed. I finally figured out it was because I'd set up my Internet connection as using DHCP when I should have said ppp0e. The system was searching in vain for a connection that wasn't there--and luckily was smart enough to find the one that WAS, finally. After I unchecked the DHCP box, everything was back to normal speed at boot time.