<laughs> Well considering that most of our repair work is hands-on, it's not too frustrating. It's a lot easier when you can troubleshoot a system right there. Now trying to fix my 71 year old Granny's laptop over the phone IS frustrating. She lives two hours away, so sometimes the phone is our only option. It doesn't help that she knows absolutely nothing technical about computers. "I clicked on something, I'm not sure what, in my Outlook and now everything is all mixed up. What do I do?" Oh...my...god...

Packet loss is huge. That will definitely cause you to stutter around and whatnot. Hang on to the box for that 9800, get your cable fixed and try the 9600 again. You might have gotten lucky and got one of the few good 9600 cards out there. If that's the case, you can return the 9800. If it were me though, I'd try to find the packaging for the 9600 and take that thing back and keep the 9800 bad boy.