So my housemate dug up this old computer from his mum's house and decided to rebuild it just for fun. It's quite old..has an AMD sempron 2.0ghz on an Asus M2N something motherboard. Anyway I believe all the drivers are up to date, since we just did a clean Windows 7 install and I told him to grab the drivers off the net (whether or not he installed them is a different matter). The issue seems to be that when the network cable gets plugged in, the router goes nutso and kills all LAN traffic for everyone in the house. Wireless connections continue to work, but new wireless connections cannot be established as it won't assign IPs. I can't even access the configuration page for the router from my PC when his is plugged in. Removing the cable instantly fixes the problem, and swapping ports doesn't seem to help. BTW it's a Netgear DGN2000 modem/router. Thanks
Maybe you need to change the settings on the NIC(network card) I had an issue with speed once and it was due to me choosing to make it full duplex. I've done this before but for some reason it affected the speed.
It's not an issue with speed, it's just not getting an IP and killing all traffic for everyone else. I'm starting to think the ethernet controller is totally rooted, but I don't have a spare NIC to test with, I'll try getting my hands on one some time this week.