Ok, this is kind of strange. Thought I'd throw it out here first before I took it to the factory list, or submitted a bug... mainly because I'm not sure what's going on yet. Long story..... I installed the 10.2 Beta 1 last night, and right about the time the NIC was ID-ed and the driver loaded, the NIC "switched off". Don't really know how else to describe it. The NIC light went out, and the router it's connected too no longer had a light indicating an active NIC connected. At first I figured it was just an issue with 10.2 Beta 1... so I booted back to 10.1. No network, and the NIC is still off. I booted to WInXP, and no NIC there either. Rebooted the router... no fix. Changed cables, and changed router connections... still no network, and NIC is "off". I left it was it was overnight, and started tinkering again this morning. Restarted the computer from a cold start, and immediately had a network connection in 10.1. Booted to 10.2 Beta 1 and had network. The network worked fine on all OS-es I booted to this morning. This afternoon I decided to reinstall 10.2 Beta 1 to try out a few other options etc. The install worked ad passed the NIC ID and config section. I rolled the install back to a section before the NIC was configured, and did the NIC config again... this time the NIC "turned off" and again I had no network connectivity in any OS I booted to. I tried all variations on the cabling (in case it was a bad cable) including connecting direct to the cable modem, and had no connectivity... no lights on the NIC at all. I shut the computer down completely, and did a cold start - no NIC. Went into the BIOS, disabled the onboard card, saved, cold start, back into the BIOS, and re-enabled the NIC... and it's working again. A little more tinkering, basically reconfiguring the NIC in 10.2 and the 3rd try at it and the NIC "switched off" again. Repeat the whole cold start and BIOS tinkering again (as this seems to be the only thing that will wake up the card) and it starts working again. It is stable now through multiple restarts, and multiple OS-es (10.1, 10.2 Beta 1 and WinXP) as long as i don't try to configure it in 10.2. Nothing I can see in the logs etc that would indicate a problem. The NIC is an onboard ASRock In M5263 using the uli526x driver/module. (ID-ed the same on both 10.1 and 10.2). So.. after all that is there anything anyone can think of for the cause of this odd problem? I've triple checked the hardware and it seems fine. It fails ONLY when i attempt to (re)configure the NIC in 10.2 Beta 1, and then not every time. It does not fail if I reconfigure the card in WinXP or in 10.1. Could it be something in 10.2 Beta 1? Any ideas? C.