ASUS P5Q Deluxe Ethernet "Hardware Failure"

I just built a P5Q Deluxe with four Seagate 1TB SATA drives (SATA1-4) plus a SATA DVD Writer (SATA6). In the BIOS, the SATA is set to "IDE", and I installed Windows Server 2003.

In the ten days of operation, I have experienced two ocassions in which my network connection went "bad". It lost its network connectivity and reported only "hardware failure" (perhaps "hardware error" -- I can't recall) when trying to use PING via the command prompt. The first time, I moved it to the second ethernet port to get it working (I don't recall if I had to power-off or not). The second time, it was on the second port. When I powered-off and restarted, it worked again.

Is this a known problem? It might be a BIOS problem (I am on BIOS 605), but I am cautious about upgrading the BIOS. I will be setting up RAID soon -- any issues with the newer BIOS levels?

Thanks to all in advance ... Craig