The WP requires a little over 5 volts to boot. Which is why my nice AT psu would not power it up. It was an nice older high end one, that was well regulated.
Someone on the [H] board posted that the board was regulated after the usb port. Power was fed straight from the PSU. Leaving them over voltaged. When it spiked, it would make my nic stop working. This got me to thinking how to control the usb voltage. After making some posts, people were thing making a regulator.
I found an easier way.
We have already been running the fans off the serial port. Why not the USB. So I desoldered my power and negative wires and resoldered them to teh serial port, crossed my fingers and hit the power.
It worked. While not 100% stable for large transfers (more than likely an OS or driver problem), I can surf for hours without my nic shutting down. Which is a huge improvement over what I had before.
For an internally mounted USB nic thats the easy way . For an external its a bit more complicated. What you can do though, is cut the tracks leading to the usb port, and solder leads from the serial port to the correct points on the board. I will try and get some pictures up soon, but I figure its a pretty simple mod really.
This should also help those with usb mouse and keyboard problems.
Basically I used one serial port for the Nic and the other for my fans.
