Continuing internet oddities

[cothrige <cothrige@bellsouth.net>]

I have been having some troubles with my DSL internet connection for a
while now.  First an upgrade appeared to remove some or all of the
dhcp related software on my box.  Thanks to this list I think I fixed
that by installing dhcp3-client.  But, then the connection would only
be there about half of the time I booted.  Thanks again to this list I
can now work around that, though I still don't know how to fix it
entirely.

More troubling at this time, though, is that even when I have a
connection it drops out.  Very often I will open a browser and get one
page up, and then for something like five minutes I can do nothing.
No pages will load and nothing goes out.  If I open a terminal and try
something like 'ping www.google.com' it does nothing at all.  Finally,
things will start moving again but this will only last for a few
minutes and then drop out again.  BTW, my wife's Windows box connects
fine and does not have this problem, and so I am assuming it is
something in my system.

In order to see if things were looking okay when it was working I
pinged google and got this:

PING www.l.google.com (64.233.187.104) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 64.233.187.104: icmp_seq=1 ttl=243 time=41.2 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.187.104: icmp_seq=2 ttl=243 time=39.8 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.187.104: icmp_seq=3 ttl=243 time=39.7 ms
64 bytes from 64.233.187.104: icmp_seq=4 ttl=243 time=59.0 ms

--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 2998ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 39.704/44.948/59.051/8.164 ms

This looked fine to me, or at least not bad in any way.  I still get
the same speeds with downloads and such, about 350Kbs from a decent
server, and so it seems that when things drop out they do so
completely, and otherwise the connection is fine.  But I just don't
know where to start looking for an answer.  What could cause such
dropouts and how could I narrow things down?  Did I not install
everything which helps configure and setup such a connection?

Thanks,

Patrick