Thanks to a little tip from cpetego , I finally managed to get our new HP Mediasmart home server stabilized last night. The problem was that I hadn't set a static IP for the server, which is apparently a good idea for a server. Of course no where in the instructions did it say anything about assigning a static IP.

I did run into another related problem last night. This past weekend I attempted to backup Joe's PC, but the backup failed due to the unstable connection to the server. Even after I assigned the static IP my next backup attempt failed due to a "corrupted backup database." I think the dropped connections screwed something up.

I read through all of the instructions for fixing this, and I finally needed to unmount the two extra drives in the system. Now I'm just running on the one drive that came with the server. I set Joe's backup to run over night and I was happy to see this morning that it successfully completed. Tonight I'll try remounting the extra drives and see if I run into anymore problems.