Tonight, I will be installing a test kernel onto the machine which hosts home directories and some virtual machines tonight and re-enabling hardware offloading.
This is in order to determine exactly what kernel broke the E1000 drivers so they can look between the last working kernel and the one that broke it and figure out which change caused the problem.
This means we will be back in a state where there may be pauses and NFS problems again but only temporary so they can determine which kernel, fix it, and be back to where we can have it work with the performance of hardware offloading.
Because almost everything depends upon access to home directories, this will break pretty much all services for a hopefully brief period.