Well, I got a chance to do some more testing and troubleshooting in between shoveling out of the first (semi-)major snow storm here in the suburbs of Boston. I'm happy to report that I think I've got the problem solved. I only say "think" because I didn't really get a chance to fully test things, but it certainly look promising.
<br><br>After spending a few hours monitoring the system (top, hdparm, etc.) during various states of both the F/E and B/E systems and not really seeing much, I decided to take a closer look at the NIC. I popped a 3-Com card that I had lying around into the system. It took me a bit to get it working because the system was being a fussy about the order of the PCI cards, but eventually I got everything up and running. I then went to the F/E and tested the HDHR with Live TV, and was very happy to see the dropouts and breakups had magically disappeared. I would describe the picture quality as near perfect. Due to time constraints I was only able to test Live TV, but this is the first and most prevalent spot that I saw the problem, so I'm pretty confident that my other problems will be solved also. Must have been something about the on-board NIC and/or the driver it was using that was the cause of the problem. I guess this disproves my theory that problems on the NIC would have shown up somewhere (ifconfig, system logs, etc.)
<br><br>I want to take one more opportunity to thank everyone who replied to my posts with their thoughts and ideas. <br><br>John<br><br>