soltek eq3801 (nforce 3) onboard and wireless usb nic issues

[coho66]

System is as follows:

-Soltek QBic EQ3801-300P with NForce 3 chipset, Bios Vers R1.8 (latest)
-apic is enabled in bios
-DLink DI-524 wireless router with newest firmware
-Trendnet TEW-424UB usb2.0 wireless NiC using driver 1.2.0.1 (latest)
-WinXp Pro SP2 with All updates
-Nforce driver version 5.10 (vers 5.11 causes bsod??) along with usb2.0 drivers


-i use windows wireless zero for my wireless config rather than the trendnet utility because the trendnet utility causes frequent random disconnects

-one wall and ~20-30 feet separate the wireless router from the adapter; signal strength is never an issue according to software

My problems?:

-wired networking using the onboard Nforce 3 nic seems to like dropping ip's... I recall reading somewhere that it sometimes helps to input the adapter's mac address in the "network address" box of the adapter's config, but no such luck with me. I thiiink i've also read somewhere that uninstalling the nforce ide drivers has helped but that's a distant memory and would like to avoid doing that if possible....

-my wireless network works fine until the cpu usage goes up (along with fan noise/rpm)....under heavy cpu intensive tasks the wireless network disconnects until the cpu usage goes down where it will again reconnect and work fine again..

any suggestions?? any insight/direction would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Coho