I thought I was having troubles with the 3Com 503 
card that I have locking the system up. Turns out 
that my IDE controller was causing the issue. The
card is rare, and I couldn't find the exact manual
for it, but I found one that was close. However,
the manual said to leave a certain jumper on if
wanted the card bios enabled, and remove it to
disable the onboard bios. I finally removed that
jumper, but the IDE bios still posts, and now
everything is working perfectly. I think there
was an interrupt issue with the NIC, but I'll 
never know because I don't have the right docs.

In any case, networking is working perfectly now
with zero freeze-ups.

For telnet, I noticed that many of the older clients
are extremely slow. There is a newer telnet client
that ships with the ssh2dos package, and it has
very acceptable performance. It's the fastest of
all the clients I've tried, and the most compatible.
I haven't been able to get ssh to work though.