so at home i have a setup along the lines of

rest of the world <==> | rtk0 (router/firewall) rtk1 | <==> internal net

recently, I've been getting really strange behavior from what I've pinned
down to being my realtek 8139 card at rtk1.  the router has been up for a
few months just quietly sitting in the corner of the living room doing
what it does, but recently, I've been having trouble with sending a little
over a MB of data over the wire.  Often, it will just stall and crap out
a couple hundred kb into a transfer.  Sometimes, it will transfer all
the data, just really slowly (this morning, 2MB took 5 minutes), and 
sometimes it works just fine (though less of that lately)

The really strange thing is that any existing connection independent of
the individual crapping-out transfer is just fine.  For example, my
xforwarded gaim and licq work just fine during these episodes, though
they themselves will similarly periodically crap out over the course of
the day.  For the necessities, a while loop and rsync can still get the
job done, but it's excruciatingly annoying...

I don't have this problem downloading stuff off the net straight onto
the router/fw (over rtk0), and I don't have a proublem sending from
one computer to another in the internal net, and I've checked the cable...

could there be some cause of this other than just flaky hardware?  I've
turned on the debug flag on rtk1 to see if it'd do anything, edited 
syslog.conf to drop everything I could think of somewhere in /var/log,
and grep'd through /var/log/* and don't see anything that points to a
likely cause.  

so, if it is dying hardware, is there anything I can do to make things
more bearable while I'm waiting for my new (3com) cards?

thanks
--sean

fwiw i'm running

NetBSD bitchbox 1.5ZA NetBSD 1.5ZA (BITCHBOX) #1: Sun Feb 24 11:34:36 EST 2002     gr@grappa:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/BITCHBOX i386

# dmesg | grep rtk
rtk0 at pci0 dev 12 function 0: RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX
rtk0: interrupting at irq 11
rtk0: Ethernet address 00:50:bf:43:5e:49
ukphy0 at rtk0 phy 7: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface
rtk1 at pci0 dev 13 function 0: RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX
rtk1: interrupting at irq 10
rtk1: Ethernet address 00:50:bf:43:5e:3d
ukphy1 at rtk1 phy 7: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface

# ifconfig rtk1
rtk1: flags=8847<UP,BROADCAST,DEBUG,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
	address: 00:50:bf:43:5e:3d
	media: Ethernet 10baseT full-duplex
	status: active
	inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
	inet6 fe80::250:bfff:fe43:5e3d%rtk1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2