Alright, so I installed another distro (PCLinuxOS) and it did the same thing. So it was not O/S specific.

I threw in a spare NIC which was recognized without any hassle. Same thing still happening with the browsing though.

I don't have a hub, but I did install wireshark. I can capture the activity that occurs, but I have no idea what to make of it. Is there something specific I am looking for?

I got ahold of a WinXP computer, installed wireshark on it, and ran it from the same cable where the Linux box was connected. The connection works great. The main difference seems to be that on the Linux box, there are a lot of packets being broadcast from my router... protocol is ARP, and the Info says "Who has 192.168.1.101? Tell 192.168.1.1". That doesn't appear even once during the XP capture, or at the point where the connection appears to be working fine in Linux. But as soon as it starts appearing, then the connection has problems. The computer at the 101 address is another XP machine completely seperate from anything I'm doing here, with no connection problems that I am aware of.

The other difference is that on the XP capture, there are some black lines that are described as [TCP Retransmission], none of those appear in the Linux captures.

if the connection works great, then let's take its parameters. Open cmd.exe and try ipconfig/all
Take the lines ip , dhcp enabled and the 2 dns.
Under linux, try to do the same.
Maybe you have put some translation (NAT/PAT) on the router to point to 101 ?
TCP retransmission are a sign of bad network conditions.

Ooooops didn't see the first page

Not unless someone else on the network was screwing with that. What would I be looking for on my router's config page?

Yep. My network setup is far from ideal, for a variety of reasons. I'm just trying to get the Linux box working as good as it was when it was an XP box

Well isn't that interesting... looking around the router config page I found that there were some port forwarding settings to none other than 192.169.1.101. I removed all of those and now everything seems to be working a lot better than before. I'll try it out for a while, run a few more wireshark captures and see what happens.

Thing is that the port forwarding was set up for ports that had absolutely nothing to do with HTTP browsing. Why would those settings in the upper ranges cause my router so much grief when my computer tries to use port 80?

Hi, guys.

For this browser problem, i had tried RHEL4, SuSe10.1, FC5 and now FC6. Still i can't find any solution for this problem. But when i try Konqueror, it works!

But this firefox problem only occur using my house networking connection. when i try inside my office, all the browser is working fine and smooth. Is this because there is some mis-configuration to the router firewall/filter setting?