Last straw

[Cerb]

My hardware woes may be towards and end (for now).
AN35N-Ultra, BTW.

I was transferring files over the LAN and IMing, and the machine got unresponsive, then disconnected from the network. It sould not shut down. After a hard shutdown and reboot into safe mode, it took FOREVER. I finally got in, and no spyware was found. However, the link lights on my NIC were going insane.

I have a 169.x.x.x IP address with a 255.255.0.0 subnet mask, no gateway or DNS. A ipconfig /renew times out and gives an error that the DNS server cannot be found. Manually setting the IP address just causes the network properties to freeze. When not in safe mode, there are 1-2 second freezes, with 5-10 second gaps between them. I can't scan for viruses, because Norton wants to detect what I can get to on the network first--suprise suprise, it freezes.

Oddly, the crazy blinking goes on from before POST through shutdown.
I have uninstalled the drivers I could, and installed the newest from NVidia.
I have uninstalled all the crap in network properties (my first attempt at anything was uninstalling and re-installing TCP/IP).

The kicker: same behavior with the fresh install on another HD made recently in troubleshooting.

If anyone has any ideas, I'm open. Otherwise, I'll see if Newegg will do a 7-month old motherboard RMA.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Can you try a PCI NIC?

If you don't mess with networking, is the machine fine? Tested the memory lately?

 

[Cerb]

RAM is fine, I did not try a PCI NIC, but had the cable disconnected much of the time--same result whether plugged in or not. If I can find one that won't need an additional driver (like a Realtek 8029 or 3Com 900-series), I'll see how that goes.

The machine acts that way with two installs--separate HDDs, mind you, and both are the only HDD in the system at the time.
I can't log on to the domain, and CSRSS.exe spikes to 61% CPU use, then back to 0, over and over again (the performance graph just a bunch of straight lines from 4% to ~70%, not the jagged landscape-ish look that it normally takes on). LSASS goes between 4 and 10%, where it usually stayed at 0.

In safe mode, everything is fine. Safe mode with networking, however, acts just like a normal logon, except it looks uglier .

 

[n0cmonkey]

There were recent worms going around for both CSRSS and LSASS. Do you know if you are protected against those? A router _should_ be all you need.

 

[Cerb]

ClarkConnect firewall, and both installs were fully updated, save one used older drivers until the problems began.

Also, it may be telling about this board: from Newegg's description, "**NON-REFUNDABLE ITEM.Warranty is provided through product Manufacturer Only!"
It's the only NF2 mobo with that in the description. If Abit didn't use a NB fan, I'd eat $65 and get the NF-7.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Try setting the NIC to 10 mbps full duplex instead of auto-detect.

My qwest dsl modem+router started showing the fast blinking for my music server box, and even swapping PCI NICs didn't fix it. With the NIC set to auto-detect, pings to my desktop lost 50 - 100% of the packets and web connections crawled and timed out. Changing to 10 mpbs full duplex fixed it (and made the router light go normal again).

Of course I slowed down the LAN connection between my desktop and the server, but if I ever need 100 mpbs I have an old hub that works fine (the problem seems to be with the qwest box).

 

[Cerb]

Disabling onboard audio seemed to fix the NIC issue.
Still no clue why...