here's the situation...

mandrake 9.1 on my old box, trying to get mythtv going. first couple installations i couldn't get the networking card to work at all, tried changing the card even. dropped mandrake and installed red hat -- nothing. dropped red hat and installed gentoo -- nothing. finally i changed the pci slot it was in and got it working in gentoo. kind of...

ifconfig shows no dropped packets, syslog shows that it's being found just fine, 100Mb full duplex. i can get an IP and config fine (dhcp). internet is _super_ slow. gentoo relies pretty heavily on downloading files and it was taking _forever_ to install packages. decided to go back to mandrake. internet is still _super_ slow, starts off real nice for a few seconds (well, 14 K/s is real nice compared to nothing) but then drops to 0 usually stalling out completely.

got samba working after a little work (windows xp apparently doesn't like sending out passwords in cleartext). _extremely_ slow, generally it craps out just trying to send just a few files from my xp machine to mandrake. just browsing takes awhile.

can't figure this out...

adsl 1.5M internet connection

XP box is routing temporarily until i can get another box to install gentoo in as the router / internet server.

8 port giga-fast switch

mandrake 9.1
8139too network card

Your network card should work fine. Are you running through a hub? If you are then you need to switch down to half-duplex.

after playing around with it for awhile last night i think the switch may be bad. i discovered that my DSL modem is actually a router as well and plugged it directly into the switch. now my windows box started going really sloooooooooooow as well.

but then i had major other problems. after bypassing the switch with a turn-around cable the modem stopped DNSing. couldn't get it to do anything except dole out DHCP configs. very wierd stuff all around. so i turned everything off and went to work. i'll try again tonight.