linux vs windows network performance

Recently, the lan at my (mismanaged) office became slow. This caused DHCP leases to time out. About 7 minutes after dual-booting to Vista, eventually I got an IP addr and connectivity.
On FC8, running dhclient and waiting for 20 minutes, I got impatient, and went static. No help here on Google, but it will be difficult for me to re-create the crappy LAN environment, which is thankfully back to normal.

On a separate network, I booted with Xubuntu 6 live, and scp-ed a 1G file, in about 5 minutes.
Downloading the same file to a W2K box running winscp or pscp had been taking 2 hours!

I have noticed some performance issues on windows networks. If you use tshark, wireshark or any similar tool you can watch the traffic on the network. Next time you have some network latency issues you should take a look at what's going on the wire.

One thing I noticed recently. I was doing ICS (yes let's not talk about why I'm doing this; my therapist is already charging me overtime) and noticed that sometimes after a connection lost the browser and other network applications couldn't hit the internet while I could ping and telnet (I know, I know). What is going on with that. Sometimes I connect to a share on the network and transfer a file; it is not only slow but sometimes fails while the Linux machines (running samba) are talking happily?

Windows is a mystery to me.