[Lord]

Larry, it hasn't been raining too much, so I don't think that is the problem.

Felix, the orange activity light has always been solid. In fact, it has been like that for years and it always worked fine (I've had the modem for 5 or 6 years). I doubt that it is still under warranty after all of these years.

I have no idea how to back-up or take down my network. If you mean re-booting by the connection by pressing 'standby' or removing all of the wires and puting them back in, then yes, I've done that.

The router appears to be fine.

I didn' think that this could be due to spyware or a virus/trojan, etc, but I did a scan and removed all spyware and found nothing (Norton 2004 and spybot 1.2). Hijackthis didn't find anything unusual either.

There's no way I can be experiencing data load. I haven't even bought a new TV yet (old one lost sound about 2 weeks ago for some reason), so I haven't even turned on a single TV in my house ever since.

I have a firewall, but I never put it up...I should put it up right away.

I checked my online banking account and everything is fine.