new machine - problems with gaim

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   Well, here I am writing from my son's new machine. Turned out the
128MB it came with wasn't enough memory to open Open Office so I
bought an additional 256MB. However we're still having problems. He
uses gaim to chat with his friends, but when we start it up there is a
3-4 minute lag before the program will start accept text. I type into
it and it just sits for 3 minutes  before it works. Even after it
works it will once in awhile have these 3 minute lags again.

   At first I thought it might be the wireless networking having
trouble but the whole time gaim isn't working I can browse the web
just fine.

   I've shut off iptables using chkconfig --del.

   Any ideas what's causing this? I don't know where to look. There
are no special messages in dmesg.

   In /var/log/messages I do see some strangeness:

 Jan  4 18:26:04 Christmas dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on sit0 to
255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 19
Jan  4 18:26:04 Christmas dhclient: send_packet: Network is down
Jan  4 18:26:23 Christmas dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on sit0 to
255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
Jan  4 18:26:23 Christmas dhclient: send_packet: Network is down
Jan  4 18:26:27 Christmas dhclient: No DHCPOFFERS received.
Jan  4 18:26:27 Christmas dhclient: No working leases in persistent
database - sleeping.
Jan  4 18:28:47 Christmas su(pam_unix)[3284]: session opened for user
root by matt(uid=500)
Jan  4 18:30:04 Christmas dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on sit0 to
255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
Jan  4 18:30:04 Christmas dhclient: send_packet: Network is down
Jan  4 18:30:12 Christmas dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to
255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
Jan  4 18:30:12 Christmas dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on sit0 to
255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 18
Jan  4 18:30:12 Christmas dhclient: send_packet: Network is down

   This sort of stuff is repeating a lot.

thanks in advance,
Mark