networking won't come back up until reboot after ISP outage

[umage]

 > When the connection goes down and comes back up it will take 5 minutes
 > before my FreeBSD gateway box checks the lease and decides if a 
renewal is
 > in order. This is automatic. If I am sitting in front of my computer 
and I
 > want to speed this up I issue /etc/rc.d/netif restart on the gateway 
and it
 > will come up and be happy in about 10 seconds, rather than waiting 
out the 5
 > minute time out.

In my case the router does get the renewed ip, as I described earlier. 
However, even after waiting 8+ hours, the system will not recover from 
the outage properly (reason unknown). That's what this thread is all about.