MailScanner doesn't deal with lousy internet

[Chris Mason]

One of my servers is on a DSL from Cable & Wireless and they are having
problems with the gateway. We are seeing periods of packet loss and
outages as they try to fix it, and it's been going on for a couple of
days now.
The server is running Redhat 7.3 and MailScanner with SA and
ClamAV/F-Prot. I found today that mail had not been delivered for hours
so I checked the server and found that the scripts that updated the
virus databases had locked up. Restarting MailScanner did not fix it and
only killing the offending PIDs solved it.
Is there a way to improve this situation? I would like to lower the
update schedule to nightly so as to lessen the chance of this happening.
Is there a way to kill off any update scripts with the old MailScanner
process?

Chris Mason