Sounds like it was similiar to the problem I was having earlier this year, odd one isn't it.

Well now wait, we don't know for absolutely certain that this was the problem yet.

I thought of another thing it could be. It could be that she is so anxious or annoyed at having to do this stuff that she subconsciously taps her foot. Unfortunately the tapping generates static electricity because she's wearing wool socks. This causes electrical problems which manifest themselves through the network card, causing it to hang.

Stranger things have happened in tech support.

My old boss told me a story about servers that they maintained back when she was moonlighting. They would reboot almost every night, and after about two weeks of reconfiguring, reinstalling, and replacing many, many items, they hit the end. She said that she wanted to be there when it rebooted, and watch the console. She drove up to the command center and waited one night with a few other techies.
Around midnight, everyone is getting antsy waiting, and a few go out for coffee. She's still there with another person or two when the janitor walked in. He starts cleaning up some of the cubes in the command center, and finally lets himself in the data center (where all the servers are). After a few minutes, the others come back with the coffee. While everyone is sipping and distracted, the machine in the spotlight reboots. Since nothing came across the console, and no warnings were given, my boss runs into the data center to see if anything physical was obvious. Just as she comes up to the machine, the janitor removes his gargantuan magnetic flashlight (that he used to get better light on the floor for mopping) from the side of the machine.
I think she described the feeling as a combination of rage and relief.

One old one I heard was about an installation in the Philippines when I worked for Unisys. This was in the days of big mainframes and proper computer rooms with elevated flooring and etc.

An installation in the Philippines was having terrible trouble with disks, and with their whole systems. They were relatively poor so they didn't have a proper room for their setup. Someone had told them how to set up a decent room, though, and had told them that it's vitally important to have a clean flooring so there isn't much dust buildup.

They decided to re-wax the floor every night. They did it by first having people put sandpaper blocks on their feet and shuffle around. With the type of wax they were using, this resulted in clouds of dust flying up every night. This was before the day of sealed disk drives...

well, it really does appear that the nic fixed it, so colour me pleased. ill keep observing for now, but it worked all evening.

~james

spoke too soon. its puking again. dammit.

~james

sonofabitch. it *seems* to work when zonealarm is disabled, but in not ready to commit to that assessment because that doesnt explain why it doesnt work in redhat. but then, maybe it does. forgive my ignorance when it comes to firewalls, but is it possible that redhats firewall (default medium setting during install) is behaving the same when as zonealarm? i suspect thats the case, and at that point im not really sure what to do short of telling casey to access it from windows with zonealarm disabled. which is a pity, shes really getting into linux.

~james

A couple of theories
 

It sounds like there are two issues going on. The first USB problems is likely derived from the USB driver crapping out under high memory load. When a lot of other stuff is running, sucking resources, the dll's that support your connection are more likely to crap out.

I'd recommend ethereal to figure out whether zone alarm is blocking the connection, and/or netstat -a in a cmd prompt window.

Good luck.

It's okay. Fixed it with a ball peen hammer, a circular saw and some duct tape. Thanks tho!

question
 

hi perth/james
i seem to have a similar problem,
how exactly did you solve the problem, sorry but i dont understand your hints about the duct tape, hammer and saw
thanks

Ooops. This is going to turn ugly.......

Caravan,

Honestly, I have no fucking clue what fixed it, it was so long ago. The only suggestion I could make at this point, knowing nothing about your config, is to disable the firewall and see if it works. Troubleshoot from there. :) The alternative (and this is where the hammer, saw, and tape come into play), is to convert the PC from a frustrating piece of garbage to a nice work of modern art.