Frequent download time outs

[jkelm@concentric.net (Jeff Kelm)]

I am having trouble getting reliable downloads using Debian 2.2.  After
downloading 30-150KB the download usually stops and eventually times
out.  I noticed this first when I tried using apt-get to download the
base system packages.  During 'apt-get update' download of the package
lists, the system will time out.  It took several attempts to finally
get the full lists.  It took even longer to download the necessary
packages.

That's the short plea for help.  The details of my system follow.  I
have a small home network that consists of a gateway/server running
Debian 1.3 (connecting to the Internet using ppp/diald), a Debian 2.0
workstation, a Win98 machine, 3 Macintosh machines, and a network
printer.

This arrangement has been working flawlessly for a long time.  I
upgraded my workstation from 2.0 to 2.2.  That is when I first started
having the downloading problems.  slrnpull stopped getting news because
of time outs (part way through the second group download).  Trying to
do anything with apt-get required several attempts to completely
download things.  The network is still active.  Other machines on the
network can still be downloading or web surfing without any difficulty. 
The workstation can still be doing downloading or websurfing in another
window when one of the connections has hung.  I can even ping the site
I am downloading from which has stopped downloading.

I recently got a new machine (AMD Athlon 700MHz) and installed Win98 on
it.  I then installed Debian 2.2 on a second partition.  This was a
fresh install of Debian 2.2r2.  I have the same problem on this machine
when running Debian.  If I boot into Win98 on this machine, I can
download all day long without a glitch.  So I don't think I have a
hardware, gateway, or ISP problem.  It seems to be isolated to Debian
2.2.

Since I can't find any mention of anybody having a similar problem with
2.2, I am assuming I have done something really stupid or missed
something really obvious.  Any help I can get with this would be
appreciated.

Thanks,
   Jeff