Hmmm, I seem to be making headway understanding the instability of my Linux box. Now that I have Debian on there, when it crashed today it had something about a frame overrun in eth0 sitting on the desktop. Maybe when I was thinking all the issues were being caused by the hard drive, they were really the NIC? Dunno. I have another one I can put in this box and yank out the other if it seems like a reasonable thing to do.