[srle]

do you seen the ethernet dropping out with any of these ?

I've added a second usb Ethernet adapter and it always works (had to add a start-up script to configure it dough)
The built-in Ethernet, for some reason loses the gateway connectivity after a while - it sees the rest of the network, but can not ping the gw.

I've solved this with is simple daemon script, which pings the gateway a couple of times every two minutes - it's not elegant but it works.