I am having some rather odd problems with my Mandrake 10.0 Official install relating to networking. Firstly, when I log in newly to a window manager, it often takes a long tine for any networking to start to work; until then, nothing will ping in or out. It also seems to take an arbitrary length of time, with it working very quickly sometimes, a short delay at other times, and a very long delay at other times still.

I also seem to be having instability in programmes that use the network: Mozilla 1.7 often freezes for no apparent reason (requiring me to restart my window manager, as killing it and starting it again gives the error that the default process is being used), and using the network backup utility reoback consistently causes system hard-locks.

I should be most grateful for any suggestions as to what the problem might be, and how to solve it.

Addendum: it is not just at startup that the network fails like this: it can happen at random moments during use. Pinging this Linux machine from a Windows machine on the network, whilst I'm pinging it the other way seems to get it started again, bizarrely.

Update: constantly pinging a computer on my local network seems to prevent the arbitrary disconnexions during use.