Last week, I worked on a Windows XP box where the wireless connection was extremely flaky. It would connect to an access point, get an IP assigned via DHCP, and have Internet access and then the connection would "reset" and DHCP process would repeat. I couldn't run any kind of download since the IP address settings would get lost in the middle of the download. This also happened with the wired Ethernet connection we tried during testing. Weird.

I did some research and learned about a "netsh" command that can be used to reset the TCP/IP stack to default settings.

Now, I've read about people having problems with NICs not being recognized, with DHCP not working, etc., on Linux systems but I've never heard of a *nix network protocol stack getting "corrupted" to the point of having to reinstall.

Has anyone here encountered a problem where the network protocol stack itself got corrupted to the point of having to reinstall Linux?

Peace...

Certainly never to the point of re-installing Linux.

It is a kernel driven service and has been de-bugged over time. It had bugs during development of new features but none that didn't eventually get fixed.

You can search bugs in http://bugzilla.kernel.org