I’ve just had this when putting mythfrontend on a nice fujitsu box that obviously runs pretty snappy.

When the FE starts it takes you to the initial config screen I think because the eth0 if is not up in time.

There are various suggestions as to how to fix this but a simple one that worked for me was to:

1. Uninstall the network manager in xmbc (not sure this is essential, but I don’t need it):
   

   # apt-get remove network-manager
   

2. Configure /etc/network/interfaces by adding:
   

   auto eth0
   iface eth0 inet dhcp