This problem might occur with ISA network adapter cards when the card receives packets faster than it can process. When a data packet arrives at the network card the packet gets stored in the buffer and an interrupt is sent to the processor. The processor has to get the packet and do its thing. Since we are dealing with ISA this all happens quite slowly and during all this more packets might arrive at the card. Once the buffer of the network card gets full the above message is displayed and the content of the buffer is wiped in order for the card to receive more packets and not lock up. This of course causes packets to be lost, however the network should be designed that effects like these are handled without issues. Therefore the receiver ring buffer overrun doesn't cause any notable problems but only a slight performance degradation. This event can safely be ignored.

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