FC3 DHCP lease not renewed

[Phil Turner <ptxml blueyonder co uk>]

I have two problems with NM on FC3. I can't find any information on the
WWW and I'm wondering whether they are bugs or something misconfigured.

The PC has 1 LAN connection via an embedded chip in the M/B. It connects
to a cable modem which is the only other device on the LAN ie, they are
connected by a single CAT 5 cable. There is only one LAN device and no
wireless devices. When the machine boots, a DHCP lease is granted and
everything works.

First problem:

If the NetworkManagerInfo Applet is started, clicking it produces a menu
with only one item 'wired'. Clicking  the 'wired' item causes the lease
to be lost. The following entry appears in /var/log/messages:

Apr  3 23:45:21 mamba NetworkManager: FORCE: device
'/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/eth0'

Other entries then start to appear as daemons find that DNS is not
working. There is no /org directory on this machine and I can find no
documentation on it. Should it contain config files?

The simple fix is not to click the 'wired' menu item, especially as
there are no wireless devices.

Second Problem:

After some hours, the DHCP lease is lost. It looks as if it should have
been renewed and wasn't. I haven't looked at it closely enough to say
whether it is a matter of the DHCP lease not being renewed or another
problem which happens sporadically and looks like that. It happens when
the machine is being actively used e.g. downloading web pages.

In both cases the NM daemon is still running and places no entries in
the /var/log/messages file. The immediate workaround is to restart the
NM daemon.

This is an FC3 system (2.6.10-1.770_FC3). I was running a custom kernel
to support an old SCSI card and had the same problems. All updates have
been installed.

NetworkManager-0.3.4-1.1.0.fc3.i386.rpm
NetworkManager-gnome-0.3.4-1.1.0.fc3.i386.rpm

M/B is an MSI K7N2 Delta with the nVidia ethernet chip. The latest
drivers from nVidia have been installed.

#/sbin/ethtool -i eth0
driver: forcedeth 
version: 0.30
firmware-version:
bus-info: 0000:00:04.0

I'm not sure whether this is a bug or something I've misconfigured 
or maybe a hardware incompatibility.  

Apologies if these are known problems, but I can't find anything on
them.
       
-- 
Phil Turner <ptxml blueyonder co uk>