Have you tried to force the speed? I had problems with a Netgear router and some network cards.
If you force the speed to 100Mb rather than Autodetect, it will often work.
I have a Netgear router and a Netgear card in one of the PC's - hmmmm....
But I agree that NVidia chipsets have some dodgy integrated peripherals - I used to get stuttering sound from the A7N8X onboard sound, so I disabled it and plugged in a cheapo Creative generic card. The firewire is pretty much unusable after SP2 - it's a 50/50 thing whether it will recognise my firewire/USB external disk, so I use USB instead. The worst thing is that I bought some no name DDR333 memory. The machine was unstable until I underclocked it to 266.
It's a shame really, Intel processors may be a bit more expensive and slower, but I never had any issues with their chipsets. Ok, they tend to have less onboard stuff, but given how cheap it is to buy cards, it's not really a problem.
Well, hopefully they will use the ULi expertise to improve the integrated peripherals and other things - though meanwhile we have to live with NF4 and its issues. Its hard to know what to recommend for a system build right now. I do think AMD has the edge in CPU's at the moment, though. Sucks about the memory - I tend to go with Crucial/Micron - they have never sold me a bad stick.
