Flaky connection woes

[pigpen]

I (and a couple of friends of mine) have been experiencing a bit of a dodgy service lately. From a clean start I can get 4 hours or so of internet access and it will slowly degrade from there.

First symptoms will be I will lose web and email access, but I can still ping the websites. I can usually still get a good 9.5Mbit from my newsgroup provider even though I cannot browse the web. Eventually that will start to slow down and eventually come to a halt. I'll still be able to ping places but with increasing amounts of loss until everything stops working.

Restarting my computer however seems to cure it, so I don't know wether it is a fault with my PC or some other obscure reason? Anybody have any ideas what's going on?

I am on NTL 10Mbit connecting through a Linksys WRT54G V2 router. I live in Ellesmere Port.