I've been having this same problem in my office. I have a 10/100 switch here. The office uplink is congested but shouldn't be relevant as both hosts are on the switch.

This is 2.0b11 and (not likely to matter) Hijack v280. If I keep the cables the same but put the empeg on another network (on a jack attached to a real switch, some Cisco thing, and not the Netgear thing here) it works much better, despite there now being a router between my desk and the empeg.

So, either:
-the bridge is bridging too much traffic to the empeg
or
-the bridge is doing something weird that's playing havoc on the empeg.

I use a 10/100 switch at home with my empeg, everything on the network but the empeg runs at 100, and all is well.

Eh, I'll just keep using the "experimental" network and hope none of my cow orkers crab