Ok! I just had a look at their new driver and it's total junk like the previous one.
It is supplied as a binary-only black box called "priv_part.o" with a few K of readable C code
around it, and consumes 224650 bytes of core. Yes, that's 220K of code just to drive ONE device. Considering that the average entire linux kernel hovers just about one megabyte of compiled code, that is GROSS!

Not only that, but the driver feels so important about itself that it has to create its own special entry as /proc/rtl8180 Not /proc/net/drivers/, no, but right in the top of /proc.

The other issue, apart from its past tendency to crash your machine if you try to unload it, is that you have no idea what all that code is *doing* to your machine. It has not been reviewed by the Open Source community's sharp minds, ponly cobbled together by the poor code grinders who had to write it, nor can you have any idea whether it takes advantage of the network to send "customer survey information" back to RealTek. In 220K it could do *anything*.

I would have said "Give the card to a windows fiend, and get something properly supported", but the installation of the drivers on a windows 98 2Ed failed to find the files it wanted from the Win CDROM (which I gave it when it asked), leaving Windows complains about missing .vxd files when it boots up. Disinstalling the driver didn't fix this.

Conclusion: RealTek RTL8180 software support for this card is utter junk, both technically and politically, so don't buy RealTek network cards.