Lubomir Sedlacik wrote:

>
>>  Every time something happened to the
>>interface, such as me putting it into promiscuous mode with tcpdump,
>>there would be another two minute wait for the autoselect.
>>    
>>
>
>that's normal CatOS behaviour.  if you want to avoid this expensive
>autonegotiation, set the port to "switchport nonegotiate"
>  
>

This doesn't sound like an autonegotiation issue but more like a 
spanning-tree problem.
If you are shure that this port is only used for a host connection and 
not to connect
other switches (so no loops can happen), you can turn off spanning tree 
for that switch-
interface bye setting "spanning-tree portfast" (Cisco IOS) for this 
interface. The whole
spanning tree process for a switch interface takes about 55 seconds 
(Cisco with
default  spanning tree parameters), so you can save a lot of time here.

Werner