strange environmental issue

thinkpad t41
current updating twice a day
gnome, all ports current

last week i was whining about dumpless system reboots every hour or
three.  well, i now believe it to be an environmental, possibly net
stack, issue.

when i was seeing the issue(s) was when the laptop was in a hotel
room in florida (don't ask).  the minute i escaped and hit t-mo at
a red rug in o'hare, and everywhere i have been since, no problems.
now back home in hawi, no problem.

but, why i write is that there was a possibly associated problem
which i did not report.

when i was in the bad environment, my browser would lock up when it
tried to load more than one page at the same time.  i normally have
a browser in a virt desktop with four windows each window with
three to six tabs.  if i tried to start this way, it locked up in
start, with about two pages loaded and the rest infinitely
spinning.  if i started an empty browser and opened three tabs and
tried to load pages into them, same lockup.  my normal browser is
galeon, but i also had the same problem testing in epiphany and
pure moz.

while i don't like to pre-guess bugs, the following thought has
been in my mind.  what if the hotel's (free) ether service was
somewhat sick and not letting tcp sessions progress normally if
there were too many running simultaneously?  what if the -current
stack has a race, buffer, mutex, ... issue?

well, i am already too far into conjecture.  but i thought this
worth reporting in case it tickles a mind better than mine.

randy