After 3 days of uptime, surfing on the second machine and also playing games I'm convinced this has been sorted out.

I believe there were two issues involved.

1. The network card was not supported by FreeBSD. (It was so outdated it had a BNC connector on it.)

2. (I'm not sure this was affecting the network) I had a bad RAM slot on the motherboard.


Thanks for your help guys.

I love it when a plan comes together!