I just did a fresh expert install and noticed that when doing FTP to either a machine on my LAN or on the internet doing an ls or a get would just hang for what seemed like forever before returning a response. I aslo noticed that connecting to Samba shares took forever too. And doing a ping to and internet site would timeout. I did a ps and killed and disabled 'firewall', since my linux machine is already behind a firewall, this didn't change the network slowness. I then killed and disabled 'sshd', again nothing changed. But when I rebooted FTP, Samba, and ping all worked great. I'm not sure what sshd is (besides being the 'secure shell daemon'), but would that have been effecting my FTP and Samba stuff? or was it the firewall daemon?