Unfortunatly, this is a very different situation than the one I was facing. It looks like your issue is directly related to that security update and the firmware on the embeded card, whereas the issue I was having was related to the way the tulip driver was interfacing with my netgear card.
You may just want to see what module is being loaded for the card you have, and see if there are any paramaters you can pass to it like I did with the netgear.

I wish you luck on fixing this issue, as it seems that you are not alone.