It sounds like something strange 
, I had this network at home since 8 years(1997). I was like a mistake , a friend of mine gave me some network cables that supports 10Mbit/s, and I had to find a cheap hub. I found one for ~800SR , 10Mbit/s hub.
It was not well planed network, two computers . one was mine , second was my little sister. and the network to share files and share printers.
Network start to grow up since internet started officially 1999 , and I gave the chance to my brothers to access the internet ( cheaper solutions) to connect them directly to that old diry dusty 10Mb hub.
In 2002, I was lucky to have DSL at home, so the network demands started to be more complicated. at that time I was running 5 computers + 1 port for DSL modem(without router )
Then I bought 11Mbit Wifi Access Point. and that was a big jump :p. and I had to connect it to the old messy durty hub.
It was good enough network to access internet at 256Kbps speed DSL , but to copy file from one machine to the other , it was like night mare. and sometimes if I try to connect to my FreeBSD machine. it takes longer than what is expected. Actually I didn’t pay attention to this issue.
During this weekend, I bought two new switchs 100Mbit/s (73 SR ) and I brought some new cables. and re-orgnize the network, two switchs , 1 for the ground floor , 1 for the second floor. , Wifi Access Point connected to the first Switch. and a cat 5 cable (cross-over) connecting the two switchs, then all of the computers at home were cabled(I’m not sure if this can be verb :p) to the nearest switch.
   I stopped looking at this story, and I said, I need to re-look at everything in my life, I might have something I used to deal with it while it’s like a night mare , and it’s not take much time to fix and make my life easier.