Asterisk causing high LAN activity periodically

Hi.

I am having some network issues which I believe are cause by the Asterisk box I have added to my LAN. About once a day I have a huge amount of network activity which slows down everything. My pings from my personal machine to the router for from >1ms to 2000-5000ms. To see what was causing the problem, I disconnected one port at a time and deduced that the Asterisk box is the problem. If I disconnect it the network returns to normal.

Could it be a configuration thing? I obviously thought the machine might have a virus, but the box was installed with AsteriskNOW and has always been on the LAN using NAT.

Anyone experience this? Any ideas on how to solve this. NOt really a good solution to kill my phones for a while when this happens.

Thanks.

Wireshark is your friend. use it to sniff the traffic and see what is the nature of this traffic is.