The XP/W2K playing with the NIC's onboard setting is very annoying especially it doesn't inform me, the user. I have a similar experience with an ancient 3C905TX. Not that it doesn't work under linux, just mii-tools has problem with it and for some distribution(like redhat), it relies on the output of mii-tool to determine if the network card is working before it does the ifconfig stuff.

I need to dig out a DOS diskette, booting into DOS and run the 3Com config utility to set things straight. This is ridiculous.