I tried a new NIC.  The only one I could find which was PCI.  It worked for a while and then seemed to cause stability issues with the motherboard.  The thing is literally ancient so no surprise there.  It did work well for the time though which leads me to believe that it's just a compability issue with the built in NIC.  I can mine in windows 7 fine.  Haven't tried other linux distros yet because I like the simplicity of smos and the historical charts it gives.  

thanks for the link I haven't gone through those troubleshooting steps yet and have something to try when I get home tonight!