Frequent loss of contact with ISP

[Ned Harrison]

I reciently upgraded my home computer to FreeBSD 5.3 p5.  Sense then I've had 
minor problems connecting to my ISP.  During boot up it will sometimes freeze 
at the line, "Configuring syscons: keymap blanktime." or I'll lose contact 
with my ISP while sending an email or surfing the web.  From an earlier 
posting to this forum I found that "Ctrl+C" will let the system finishing the 
boot up.  Then I can easily connect to my ISP by running "/etc/netstart" as 
root. 

Everything works fine at least for a while.  However, sooner or later I'll 
lose the conection again.  I have not been able to discern a pattern to the 
disconnects either.  Yet as soon as I run netstart again everything works 
again.  It can be hours before I the lose the connection or sometimes I'll 
lose the connection again within twenty minutes.   I've searched for a 
permanent fix by looking throught this forum.  But I havn't found anything 
yet.  Though that might be because I don't quite know how to search! :-)

I am a newbie using FreeBSD so any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you,
Ned