Network cards/routers act extremely bizarre if a surge gets in the ethernet. My house was surged last summer and our router, also a 4 port Linksys, totally died. Windows was seeing my NIC but it was randomly giving me "cable disconnected" and would never actually get online, on this card changing integrity made no difference, I have plenty so I just put another in. I work with computers and once a week I get someone who can't connect to the same port they connect to everyday at work with the auto-select setting. Sometimes it just won't work until setting the link integrity to something other than auto-select. Another interesting piece of info is that the router that we thought had fried eventually started working again with no interaction on our part...little odd I thought since I goofed with it for hours resetting it and doing various voodoo dances. Lightning is some wacky stuff.

I also have worked part time for a chain of comp repair stores(CPR).And I always will remeber knowledge the elders dispensed to me.
1) Was that power dipps are more harmful to sensitive components than regular house surges.

I've also found that installing hardware with the power plugged in is pretty bad for equipment as well as the nervous system.