Okay, so I have a laptop, its a neat little P133MMX with 48mb of ram.
It was running FreeBSD 5.0.
Anyway, with the PCMCIA network card I had, there was heaps of packet loss, and it took about 60 seconds on lan for a ping to go thru which is completly insane. I tried cables and soon worked out that isnt the problem.
I installed Linux (Red-Hat) and there is no longer a problem.
What the hell could make FreeBSD act like that?