Crappy appt network

Alright guys, my girlfriend lives in these great upscale apartments, they offer free broadband (between DSL and cable speeds; shared bandwidth) which is great the problem is whoever set up the network had NO idea what they were doing.... They're running a 192 network set to MSHOME, it doesnt seem properly subnetted and only has one DNS (no secondary)...

I was running a copy of ubuntu here for awhile I never had a problem, it configured eth0 fine, DHCP went without a hitch. We upgraded her PC and put XP Home on there. Set it up, limited or no connectivity. Hmm ok try a few things (winsock fix and whatnot) still nothing. Try reloading the OS, still nothing, use different NIC's still nothing. Try a copy of XP pro, nothing. Load in every networking protocal, and all that, same thing. I finally went into the older unbuntu box and grab the network settings and configured windows to work alright, now the problem is every now and again the connection times out, I cant access specific sites including mail.yahoo.com, its been like these on both windows and linux. I had zonealarm running, thought that might be the catalyst. So I went and turned that off, still having issues. Turned off windows default firewall, updated all drivers (BIOS and everything) tried IE 6, FireFox, Opera all have the same intermitten connection problems, and the problem accessing pages. FTP protocal wont work either...

So my question is: Is there anyway I can get a little extra bandwidth, or atleast actually get the DHCP working? I know they're on it (because they're just using comcast cable), OR SOMETHING? I'm kind of in a bind being as I cant ever check my email... Thanks you guys!

Try doing a tracert to those sites and see where it times out. Maybe there are so many hops before you get to the site it times out. After the last big storm in my area it seems lots of internet traffic is being routed another direction now because I and many other people cannot get to amazon.com anymore. The trace routes to it times out after 18 or so hops.

Yeah, I've checked the cable a few times, used different ones etc.
I've also gone through set the recieve buffer size (on my NIC) to 8k bytes. I've also gone trough MS's knowledge base and added the reg keys to change MTU to 1400. Still gives me intermitten problems that seem to have no real connection (ie. cant see ibm.com but I can log into the forums. Cant get to the computer section of ebay but I can use shopping carts/wishlists on newegg.) It's very strange

The thing is with the apartments we live at, the network admin was contracted out, and for some reason no one seems to know where to go ask questions. The people working here have no clue what a router is, much less Prim. and Alt. DNS'es.

What I can gather from them is they have two DSL lines (quest comm.) and two leased T1 lines w/ some type of router and load balancing set up.